Google I/O 2011 Countdown clock | Hacker News Reader

Google I/O 2011 Countdown clock

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144 pointsabhishektwr29 comments

Google IO contestants had to implement this in a few hours on Android for their last call competition:

https://sites.google.com/site/lastcallforio2011/quickfire-su...

This is how I got my Google IO ticket.

Did you notice you can drag other elements on the page down below the clock and the balls will bounce off them. ;)

Has anyone else noticed you can move most of the design elements around and they interact with the balls. Everything except the Android holding the QR sign, the clock itself and the copyright line can be dragged around. The Google IO logo is the only one that you can move, but doesn't interact with the balls.

Beat me to it. The balls interact with the logo for me though.

Ball collision seems a bit wacky. It looks like each cohort can bounce off each other, but will pass right through any other ball.

* I find it pretty hard to read the time. They maybe should reduce the white space between the ball grid.

* The android holding the QR code covers up the time. I think the designer has a larger monitor than me. :-)

* The balls bouncing around sometimes interact with each other and sometimes don't. That's a nice hack to make it 2.5-D.

* The balls that don't move still flicker when the number changes. Fixing that would make it slicker.

Overall, a great concept. :-)

There's also something weird going on towards the edges of the screen. The balls become half-balls almost.

re 1: I guess its more about "looking amazing", not about usability. I looked at the clock and forgot to look at the date (had to re-open the tab to see when the event was). Looks amazing, though.

re 2: I think that's intentional, because you can drag-and-drop all items on the page. Just drag the title from behind the QR to an empty place on the page.

re 3: Dunno. My arm seems to be a bit slow to actually move many balls simulateously with sufficient FPS.

http://cl.ly/2S2y0s1W1S3G220u1Y3i

above is a screenshot of it (after prpon played with it).

Could be funny to create a real version of this where balls are pushed from behind out of the holes.

Very well done!

Initially I thought they have done this using HTML5 but not. A closer look on source code and then each ball is just image like this one http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/static/img/ball-13acfa...., so lot of them and Javascript to animate them. Quite heavy though.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/the-img-element.htm...

ohh thanks, looks like I was wrong. Bad on me.

That reminds me of when you could interact with the logo with your mouse. Thanks for sharing a great link.

If you wanna play with that again, check out http://vincentwoo.com/google.html

Based on the same idea http://www.purincess.com/ExplodingBuddha/

The official version is also up in the Google logo archive:

http://www.google.com/logos/particle.html

(Actually, almost all the interactive doodles are up in the archive:

PacMan: http://www.google.com/pacman/

Buckyball: http://www.google.com/logos/buckyball.html

Particle Ball: http://www.google.com/logos/particle.html

Instant: http://www.google.com/logos/logos10-3.html (halfway down on the page)

Jules Verne: http://www.google.com/logos/verne.html

Bunsen: http://www.google.com/logos/bunsen.html

Charlie Chaplin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NGSU2PM9dA&feature=playe...

It's missing Lennon (alas), Rube Goldberg, and Earth Day (which'll probably get up eventually), along with some other ones that were simple click-through images.)

What's supposed to trigger this sound? http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/static/punch-go.mp3

Mobile safari is kinda freaking out if you watch this on an iPad.

I can't drag and drop. I'm using the latest Chrome build...

Edit: Nevermind, it's just the Android robot and QR code that I can't move

Wow, that slowed my dual quad core system with 12gb of RAM and a 2gb ATI down to about 5 FPS.

Weird runs perfectly on my oldish 6000+ AMD with 2 gig of ram.

That's pretty irrelevant if you don't tell us what browser you were rendering it with.

Yeah, I was going to mention FF4, but didn't want to start a browser preference war. Also, I tend to not be very impressed with things that only work (or work well) on one modern browser, but not others.

It runs about 2 FPS on an iPhone 4. When was your last malware scan?

Probably depends on your browser. Stutters on Camino (~Firefox 3.0) when there are lots of balls, runs OK in safari 5, butter smooth in Opera 11.10 and the latest webkit trunk.

This is on a base 2010 macbook upgraded to 8GB RAM.

made by Matt King, http://mking.me

ironically it seems to work best on IE 9, due to IE's hardware acceleration

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