The holiday spirit is about giving and though we’re early into April, we’re still in
that spirit. Today, we’re announcing that Google's Santa Tracker is now open source on GitHub
at google/santa-tracker-web and
google/santa-tracker-android.
Now you can see how we’ve used many of our developer products to build a fun and engaging
experience that runs across the web and Android.
Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on
December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired games and an interactive
North Pole village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.
Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.
Android app
The Santa Tracker Android app is a single APK, supporting all devices
running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and up. The source code for the app can be found here.
Santa’s
village is a canvas-based graphical launcher for videos, games and the tracker. In
order to span 10,000 pixels in width, the village uses the Android resource hierarchy in a
unique
way to scale graphics without needing assets for multiple density buckets, thereby
reducing the APK size.
Games on Santa Tracker Android are built using a combination of technologies such as
JBox2D (gumball
game), Android view hierarchy (memory
match game) and OpenGL with a purpose-built rendering engine (jetpack
game).
To help with user engagement, the app uses the App
Indexing API to enable autocomplete support for Santa Tracker games from Google
Search. This is done using deep
linking.
Android Wear
The custom watch faces on Android Wear provide a personalized touch.
Having Santa or one of his friendly elves tell the time brings a smile to all. Building custom watch faces is
a lot of fun but providing a performant, battery friendly watch face requires certain
considerations. The watch face source code can be found here.
Santa Tracker uses notifications to let users know when Santa has started his
journey. The notifications are further enhanced
to provide a great experience on wearables using custom backgrounds and actions that
deep link into the app.
On the web
Santa Tracker on the web was built using Polymer, a powerful new library from the
Chrome team based on Web Components. Santa Tracker’s use of Polymer demonstrates how easy it
is to package code into reusable components. Every scene in
Santa's village (games, videos, and interactive pages) is a custom element, only loaded when
needed, minimizing the startup cost of Santa Tracker.
Santa Tracker’s interactive and fun experience is built using the Web Animations
API, a standardized JavaScript
API for unifying animated content - this is a huge leap up from using CSS
animations. Web Animations can be written
imperatively, are supported in all modern browsers via polyfills and
Polymer uses them internally to create its amazing material design effects. Examples of these
animations can be found using this
GitHub search.
Santa believes in mobile first; this year's experience was built to be optimized for
the mobile web, including a fully responsive design, touch gesture support using
Polymer, and new features like meta-theme color
and the application
manifest for add
to homescreen.
To provide exceptional localization support, a new i18n-msg component
was built, a first for Web Components. Modeled after the Chrome
extension i18n system, it enables live page-refresh for development but has a build
step for optimization.
Now that the source code is also available, developers can see many of the parts that
come together to make Santa Tracker. We hope that developers are inspired to make their own
magical experiences.
