Posted by William Florance, Global Head, Developer Training Programs
Building upon our pledge to provide mobile developer training to 100,000 Africans to develop world class apps, today we are pleased to announce the next round of Google Africa Certification Scholarships aimed at helping developers become certified on Google’s Android, Web, and Cloud technologies.
This year, we are offering 30,000 additional scholarship opportunities and 1,000 grants for the Google Associate Android Developer, Mobile Web Specialist, and Associate Cloud Engineer certifications. The scholarship program will be delivered by our partners, Pluralsight and Andela, through an intensive learning curriculum designed to prepare motivated learners for entry-level and intermediate roles as software developers. Interested students in Africa can learn more about the Google Africa Certifications Scholarships and apply here
According to World Bank, Africa is on track to have the largest working-age population (1.1 billion) by 2034. Today’s announcement marks a transition from inspiring new developers to preparing them for the jobs of tomorrow. Google’s developer certifications are performance-based. They are developed around a job-task analysis which test learners for skills that employers expect developers to have.
As announced during Sundar Pichai - Google CEO’s visit to Nigeria in 2017, our continued initiatives focused on digital skills training, education and economic opportunity, and support for African developers and startups, demonstrate our commitment to help advance a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. By providing support for training and certifications we will help bridge the unemployment gap on the continent through increasing the number of employable software developers.
Although Google’s developer certifications are relatively new, we have already seen evidence that becoming certified can make a meaningful difference to developers and employers. Adaobi Frank - a graduate of the Associate Android Developer certification - got a better job that paid ten times more than her previous salary after completing her certification. Her interview was expedited as her employer was convinced that she was great for the role after she mentioned that she was certified. Now, she's got a job that helps provide for her family - see her video here. Through our efforts this year, we want to help many more developers like Ada and support the growth of startups and technology companies throughout Africa.
Follow this link to learn more about the scholarships and apply.
Posted by Mertcan Mermerkaya, Software Engineer
We have great news for web developers that use Firebase Cloud Messaging to send notifications to clients! The FCM v1 REST API has integrated fully with the Web Notifications API. This integration allows you to set icons, images, actions and more for your Web notifications from your server! Better yet, as the Web Notifications API continues to grow and change, these options will be immediately available to you. You won't have to wait for an update to FCM to support them!
Below is a sample payload you can send to your web clients on Push API supported browsers. This notification would be useful for a web app that supports image posting. It can encourage users to engage with the app.
{ "message": { "webpush": { "notification": { "title": "Fish Photos 🐟", "body": "Thanks for signing up for Fish Photos! You now will receive fun daily photos of fish!", "icon": "firebase-logo.png", "image": "guppies.jpg", "data": { "notificationType": "fishPhoto", "photoId": "123456" }, "click_action": "https://example.com/fish_photos", "actions": [ { "title": "Like", "action": "like", "icon": "icons/heart.png" }, { "title": "Unsubscribe", "action": "unsubscribe", "icon": "icons/cross.png" } ] } }, "token": "<APP_INSTANCE_REGISTRATION_TOKEN>" } }
Notice that you are able to set new parameters, such as actions, which gives the user different ways to interact with the notification. In the example below, users have the option to choose from actions to like the photo or to unsubscribe.
To handle action clicks in your app, you need to add an event listener in the default firebase-messaging-sw.js file (or your custom service worker). If an action button was clicked, event.action will contain the string that identifies the clicked action. Here's how to handle the "like" and "unsubscribe" events on the client:
like
unsubscribe
// Retrieve an instance of Firebase Messaging so that it can handle background messages. const messaging = firebase.messaging(); // Add an event listener to handle notification clicks self.addEventListener('notificationclick', function(event) { if (event.action === 'like') { // Like button was clicked const photoId = event.notification.data.photoId; like(photoId); } else if (event.action === 'unsubscribe') { // Unsubscribe button was clicked const notificationType = event.notification.data.notificationType; unsubscribe(notificationType); } event.notification.close(); });
The SDK will still handle regular notification clicks and redirect the user to your click_action link if provided. To see more on how to handle click actions on the client, check out the guide.
Since different browsers support different parameters in different platforms, it's important to check out the browser compatibility documentation to ensure your notifications work as intended. Want to learn more about what the Send API can do? Check out the FCM Send API documentation and the Web Notifications API documentation. If you're using the FCM Send API and you incorporate the Web Notifications API in a cool way, then let us know! Find Firebase on Twitter at @Firebase, and Facebook and Google+ by searching "Firebase".
Africa's digital journey is rapidly gaining speed. According to the recent data, over 73 million people came online in Africa for the first time in 2017- that's more than the population of the UK! This means there are now about 435 million people on the continent using the Web to engage, connect and access information online. That's a good thing! But with this growth comes with an increased need to scale efforts to make the Web more relevant and useful to African users. This will require more skilled hands working with individuals and local businesses to develop content and platforms that will support Africa's digital growth.
In July 2017, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced a pledge to provide digital skills training to ten million people in Africa, and also to provide mobile developer training to 100,000 Africans. Today, in line with that commitment, we're excited to announce the launch of our new Africa Web and Android Scholarship program aimed at providing 15,000 scholarships to developers resident in Africa countries.
Working in partnership with Udacity and Andela, we will be offering 15,000 2-month 'single course' scholarships and 500 6-month nanodegree scholarships to aspiring and professional developers across Africa. The training will be available online via the Udacity training website, and the Andela Learning Community will support the students (in Nigeria and Kenya) through mentorship, in-person meet-ups, and online communities.
In order to access the full nanodegree scholarships, learners will have to complete lessons and quizzes courses being offered under the Udacity single course scholarships (also known as challenge courses) in addition to their active participation and support of classmates in the student community. We will be offering 10,000 scholarships to beginners (with little or no programming experience) and 5,000 to professional developers (with +1 year of experience) spread across Android and mobile web development tracks. The 10,000 beginner scholarships will include Android beginner courses and basic introduction to HTML & CSS; while the 5,000 intermediate scholarships include Android fundamentals for intermediate and building offline web applications courses respectively. Both courses are taught in English through an online program on Udacity open to Africa residence. The top 500 students at the end of the challenge will earn a full Nanodegree scholarship to one of four Nanodegree programs in Android or web development.
The application period closes on April 24th. Interested or want to learn more, visit https://www.udacity.com/google-africa-scholarships?utm_source=devblog
The AMP story format is a recently launched addition to the AMP Project that provides content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories.
Some stories are best told with text while others are best expressed through images and videos. On mobile devices, users browse lots of articles, but engage with few in-depth. Images, videos and graphics help publishers to get their readers' attention as quickly as possible and keep them engaged through immersive and easily consumable visual information.
Recently, as with many new or experimental features within AMP, contributors from multiple companies — in this case, Google and a group of publishers — came together to work toward building a story-focused format in AMP. The collective desire was that this format offer new, creative and visually rich ways of storytelling specifically designed for mobile.
The mobile web is great for distributing and sharing content, but mastering performance can be tricky. Creating visual stories on the web with the fast and smooth performance that users have grown accustomed to in native apps can be challenging. Getting these key details right often poses prohibitively high startup costs, particularly for small publishers.
AMP stories are built on the technical infrastructure of AMP to provide a fast, beautiful experience on the mobile web. Just like any web page, a publisher hosts an AMP story HTML page on their site and can link to it from any other part of their site to drive discovery. And, as with all content in the AMP ecosystem, discovery platforms can employ techniques like pre-renderable pages, optimized video loading and caching to optimize delivery to the end user.
AMP stories aim to make the production of stories as easy as possible from a technical perspective. The format comes with preset but flexible layout templates, standardized UI controls, and components for sharing and adding follow-on content.
Yet, the design gives great editorial freedom to content creators to tell stories true to their brand. Publishers involved in the early development of the AMP stories format — CNN, Conde Nast, Hearst, Mashable, Meredith, Mic, Vox Media, and The Washington Post — have brought together their reporters, illustrators, designers, producers, and video editors to creatively use this format and experiment with novel ways to tell immersive stories for a diverse set of content categories.
Today AMP stories are available for everyone to try on their websites. As part of the AMP Project, the AMP story format is free and open for anyone to use. To get started, check out the tutorial and documentation. We are looking forward to feedback from content creators and technical contributors alike.
Also, starting today, you can see AMP stories on Google Search. To try it out, search for publisher names (like the ones mentioned above) within g.co/ampstories using your mobile browser. At a later point, Google plans to bring AMP stories to more products across Google, and expand the ways they appear in Google Search.
