Posted: 16 Oct 2012 03:00 AM PDT

Do the leaders in your organization practice openness?

Yes

Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, Inc., recently shared his thoughts on leadership in business at the Marbles annual Big Idea Forum. He said, "For leaders to be truly effective, they're going to have to operate as catalysts. When you get into the details, it's subtle but it's incredibly important."

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New Google Play Developer Console Available to Everyone

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 10:29 AM PDT

Posted by Eva-Lotta Lamm, Riccardo Govoni, and Ellie Powers of the Google Play team

We've been working on a new Google Play Developer Console, centered around how you make and publish apps, to create a foundation for the exciting features we have planned for the future. Earlier this year at Google I/O, we demoed the new version (video). Since then, we've been testing it out with tens of thousands of developers, reviewing their feedback and making adjustments.

Today, we're very happy to announce that all developers can now try the new Google Play Developer Console. At its core, the Developer Console is how you put your app in front of hundreds of millions of Android users around the world, and track how your app is doing. We hope that with a streamlined publishing flow, new language options, and new user ratings statistics, you'll have better tools for delivering great Android apps that delight users.

Sleeker, faster, easier to navigate

You spend a lot of time in the Developer Console, so we overhauled the interface for you. It's bright and appealing to look at, easy to find your way around using navigation and search, and it loads quickly even if you have a lot of apps.

Designed for speed. Quickly locate the app data and business information you use every day. More screenshots »

Track user ratings over time, and find ways to improve

One of the most important things you'll be able to do is track the success of your app over time — it's how you continue to iterate and make beautiful, successful apps. You'll see new statistics about your user ratings: a graph showing changes over time, for both the all-time average user rating and new user ratings that come in on a certain day. As with other statistics, you'll be able to break down the data by device, country, language, carrier, Android version, and app version. For example, after optimizing your app for tablets, you could track your ratings on popular tablets.

New charts for user ratings. You can now track user ratings over time and across countries. More screenshots »

Better publishing workflow

We've completely revamped and streamlined the app publishing process to give you more time to build great apps. You can start with either an APK or an app name, and you can save before you have all of the information. You can also now see differences between the new and old versions of an app, making it easy to catch unintentional changes before you publish a new version to your users.

More languages for listings, with automated translations

You'll also enjoy a new app publishing flow and the ability to publish your app listing in 49 languages. Once you've saved any change to your application in the new Developer Console, your users will have the option of viewing an automatic translation of your listing on the web today and soon on devices — no additional action on your part is needed.

How can you try the new version?

Go to your Developer Console and click on "Try the new version" in the header or go directly to the new version. If you prefer the new version, don't forget to bookmark the new URL.

Please note that we're not quite done yet, so the following advanced features are not yet supported in the new Google Play Developer Console: multiple APK support, APK Expansion Files and announcements. To use these features, you can click "Switch back" in the header at any time to return to the old version.

Click the "Feedback" link in the header to let us know what you think, so that we can continue to improve your experience as a Google Play developer. Thank you for all of the feedback so far.

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+Android Developers

Open source in U.S. government in five minutes

Posted: 15 Oct 2012 04:00 AM PDT

Gunnar Hellekson, Technology Strategist for Red Hat's U.S. Public Sector Group, presents a timeline created by tying together data about software the government has released as open source.

Interesting facts:

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Development by Davis