This Week in Google Web Apps

Web developers can create custom web applications that provide powerful enhancements to your website. These are more than just simple web pages; they are powerful web-based applications that provide interactivity and dynamic information.

This week, Google released three new tools that are very neat examples of the types of web apps that experienced web developers can create.

Google Flight Search

Google Flight Search is Google’s new tool to combat discount travel services such as Expedia or Travelocity, as well as many others.

It integrates into the existing Google search page and automatically understands if you are looking for flight or travel information in the same way that Google Maps understands location based inquiries.

From a design standpoint however, there are some really notable features. First is the simplicity. Google is well known for creating applications that are very user friendly and easy to understand. They know that their audience will be extremely diverse and so they have done an excellent job creating a tool that is easy to use.

The second notable feature is the ability to discover new flights or destinations. This helps a traveler find flights for a nearby airport that might be cheaper or faster. There is also a quick graphical display that helps users find the cheapest flights by day of the week, since certain days might be significantly cheaper than other days.

The last notable feature that we’ll note here is how efficiently it runs. Of course it may depend a little bit on connection speed, but even on slow connections it runs remarkably well. This is doubly impressive considering the vast amount of information and databases that this is pulling from. Google is a very professional web app development company, and their skill shows.

Online Video Editing on YouTube

Not everyone has access to high quality video editing software which can make it difficult to make even simple edits to videos – such as rotating the video if you happened to record with your camera flipped sideways (common on cell phone videos for example).

Now through YouTube you can perform simple edits and adjustments to your videos. This includes

• Rotating video

• Stabilizing a shaking camera

• Trim excess footage

• Adjust the brightness and saturation

• Apply different filters

This is not a full video editing suite, but it provides some much needed features that make it easy for anyone to make a rough video look more presentable.

This seems to be a very nice public addition to Google / YouTube’s existing cloud based editor. From a development perspective, it shows that scalability of cloud based services, as well as practical consumer uses.

With over 24 hours of video being uploaded every minute, it also shows the potential power that cloud based application development can provide.

Google+ API’s

For app developers everywhere, including web application developers as well as mobile app developers, Google is releasing API’s for Google+. This means that you will be able to include deeper Google+ integration into apps and websites, even though this initial release focuses only on public data, and isn’t quite as robust as Facebook’s API’s.

Notably, this lets developers grab information that users have shared publically using RESTful web services and JSON.