Google TV Giveaway for Web Developers
services.google.com
services.google.com
This promotional program is open to U.S.-based companies that either provide web development services for their own consumer-facing websites or are involved primarily in the business of providing web development services for other consumer-focused websites and online businesses. To enter your company for an opportunity to win a free Logitech Revue with Google TV device, you must submit your company information through the provided online form below, along with a brief statement about how your company will use Google TV in connection with its web development efforts. We’ll pick the winners by selecting the entries that we think are best presented and that will offer the most valuable contributions to Google TV users and developers
Having run these types of competitions before I know the legals are a nightmare, (and shipping) but I would have thought if anyone google would understand the net is global and found a way.
Some notes about the Revue: 1) Its bulky. The thing they don't show in the images are they two large antennas that have to be propped up in the back to support wifi access. The unit itself is bigger than many dvd players these days and so will take up a significant amount of room under or near your tv.
2) Javascript is slow. Since this topic is about web development, that's what my references are oriented towards. It plays back movies and tv shows fine, but the web experience leaves much to be desired. I ran Sunspider on Chrome(the only browser on Google TV) a couple of times.
The results are here. http://bit.ly/anyy88
Compared to an iPhone 4 running the same test it was only about 2-4x faster.
3) CSS3 transitions are the way to do animations. Don't do animations using javascript. Do them using css3 transitions. JS is so slow on this particular device its nearly unusable for much more than basic stuff.
4) Plan on building 2 versions of your project, one for 1080p and one for 720p. Chrome does some auto-zooming for websites to scale them up and down depending on the tv size. This can cause problems if your 1080p site is shown on a 720p display. You can scale the 1080p down by using the css zoom property (Yep, Google is reintroducing IE's zoom in Chrome). Don't do this. There is some bug in Chrome at the time of this writing where zoom changes the way block-level elements are rendered when zoomed. It can cause odd wrapping of child elements in the event where the parent div is set to overflow:hidden. Its best to just make 2 full-size stylesheets and use a bit of javascript to detect the current scale.
5) It runs Flash, mostly badly. If you are intending to build a web app for Google TV on this hardware, try to stay away from Flash. Take a look at some of the all-Flash sites on http://www.google.com/tv/spotlight.html if you have access to a Google TV box. Youtube Leanback is a good example. http://youtube.com/leanback.
6) If you're playing video for the GTV, pay special attention to the video encoding. h.264 mp4 plays the best. It can also play natively using html5 video element, or via Flash if that's a requirement.
7) The keyboard/remote thingy sucks. Its a gimicky little piece of plastic crap that feels like something that was too expensive to manufacture in China.
I could go on at length but I'm trying to forget the weeks that went into debugging our project for this thing. And whatever else you do, if anyone you know expresses interest in buying a Google TV or this piece of crap hardware in particular, disuade them through any means necessary. This is not worth $299. Buy an Apple TV for $99 and take them out to a nice dinner instead. They'll remember it longer and love you so much more.
They're really going to have to push hard to get developers to make good 10-foot interfaces. Increasing app quality has got to be front and center. Given some of the recent posts on the Android dev blog they've begun trying hard to get developers to make better design decisions in terms of supporting various device form factors.
It's bad enough how some apps look pretty crappy on non-traditional phones like the Motorola Charm because the author didn't account for the fact that a device might have a default landscape orientation, for example.