Google I/O 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Google I/O 2014

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180 pointsdotnick125 comments

After making it all the way to the exoplanets and back to the higgs I nearly gave up before finally realizing I could scroll down.

I hate this trend in web design.

I'm glad I checked the comments here... This design doesn't make sense.

Actually I just realized I could scroll with your comment!

Oh geez. I didn't even know you could scroll down. I played around for a bit, thought "ok what's the point of this?" and just moved on.

No idea you could scroll down either, I just closed the tab and moved on.

In all honesty I did scroll but didn't realise it was interactive until reading your comment, bewildered reading about Higgs and planets

I blame the trend in UI design to hide scroll bars. On desktop they're perfectly visible and it's not so difficult to work out that you need to scroll.

In Chrome on OS X I'm seeing a scroll bar always visible on the I/O page.

Same for Firefox on Windows

It used to be much worse with flashy microsites. You'd open them and wait minutes for the first page to load. Then click somewhere and wait again. And the UIs would be much more confusing. Scrollwheel would be disabled.

This flash throwback at the top with a scroll to the rest of the site that loads instantly is a big step forward.

If you were attentive, you could notice "continue to site" arrow on the very first screen.

It's very light gray text on a white background, with a very thin line weight, and it disappears as soon as you start interacting with the page.

If your UI requires that users "be attentive" just to discover the content you're trying to convey, then your UI is awful and the user's failure to see it is entirely your fault.

Well said. I blame it partially on designer groupthink.

Of course design elements (color, typeface, white space, etc) are important...but visitors of your site are interested in consuming content NOW (not a few seconds form now). People are lazy.

Actually, I'm inclined to bet this was one designer's concept and not the work of many people reviewing prototypes and giving feedback.

Design-by-group tends to produce boring, cluttered, seen-it-before layouts with little innovation. This seems to be on the completely opposite end of the spectrum -- with no one saying, "Uh, wait -- I think you need to make it clear that you can scroll for more info."

(And also: "Uh, I'm not sure developers are going to take kindly to Google requesting access to their microphones so soon after the NSA revelations.")

That's not actually what "groupthink" means, so you aren't really disagreeing.

And that link just jumps you another animation, where you would then be as stuck as in the first place, with no more guidance link.

Wow, I just did the same thing. I actually wouldn't have scrolled down if it wasn't for your comment.

When Google originally started doing this it was essentially to open people's eyes to the capabilities of HTML. Lately, however, it has just been excessive. In this case it isn't even particularly clever: Click on stuff and stuff happens. If you had to actually align planets or build real molecules / atoms, then cool, but just clicking on highlighted things is not interesting.

I am starting to see a pattern of subtle hints about the demos this year.

I hate that I have to scroll at all to read a couple hundred words at most, let alone scroll five freakin' times on a 1080 display.

Edit: And why in the world am I getting the webcam indicator on this site‽

Also, the page wants to use my microphone, did anyone try to speak to it?

It fuddles some of the animation sequences at the top of the page. The spinning satellite changes direction on a sound, for example.

What the ... I didn't realize that till I read this post of yours even after playing all those clicking games. I thought since it's far away, may be they only have these animations here and someone shared it only because of them.

The first slide is to blame, not the overall design. I scrolled from the get-go, but that's because I didn't engage with the "play" button on the first slide which seems like the only thing they want you to do. If there were no way to interact with something in that first slide, you'd scroll.

It seems a lot of responses here were they didn't know they could scroll. I'm in the opposite camp. Didn't notice there was a play option and just scrolled :/

That’s a shame because selfishly I want everyone to see the second slide which is of the Racer game we unveiled at last year’s I/O. Was a proud moment for us code-play folk ;) http://www.chrome.com/racer

I just rage quited because of this loop...

Slightly OT, but how could you tell it was a higgs? What was the icosahedron representing?

Last summer I interned on Google+ Developer Relations so I got to go to IO for free and as staff, which is pretty rare even among Googlers.

IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.

If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.

The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough. It'll be interesting to see if there is a giveaway at all this year, since a large part of previous woes could be down to people attending just for that, and I'd cynically observe that for many attendees the long term value was actually just the giveaway.

The lottery is a definite step in the right direction, but the branding is just all kinds of terrible, and makes me wonder how much they've really learned.

If they can improve access to the same content and people at remote locations that might be a game changer (i.e. hangouts to allow remote participation in some of their sideshows), as most of the value of attending the main event is what goes on outside the main talks, thanks to YouTube being so effective for hosting those.

I honestly fail to see how the lottery improves things.

IMHO the best way is to just announce that there's no giveaway this year. Not the best promotion for the event though.

I believe the thinking is that the previous setup meant that most people there were the kind that would obsessively refresh windows in order to secure places. The lottery means there's no benefit to those possibly excessively enthused about the idea, and so the tone of the whole thing could be more balanced and professional.

They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.

> They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.

Is this no different to selling out in minutes though? Besides, hotels already know a) the dates of Google IO, and b) how many people are attending, so you'd imagine they'd already have priced that into their rates. Unless you're talking about the actual booking systems going offline, but that seems unlikely as lots of people will use aggregators (Expedia, Kayak, etc) at scale.

bestdayever

You're currently hellbanned, looks like because of this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7273699

Why do that? If you oppose the hellban, email the mods instead of encouraging him to circumvent.

Perhaps the parent objects to hellbanning on principle, and is partaking in some small amount of civil disobedience to right a perceived wrong.

If a single post happened to result in my being hellbanned, I would surely hope someone would tell me so I didn't continue wasting my time trying to participate, only to have it sent into the void. I could instead use it as a signal to either move on, or do some self introspection about my actions which resulted in the ban in the first place.

To me, it only shows that Mighty Google cannot get booking to oversubscribed events right...

>"The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough."

I'm curious, what kind of demographic imbalances?

Of all the better known conferences, material from I/O has routinely been the most interesting to me - I've gone through dozens of videos from years past on YouTube. I've been thinking about pushing to get some employer sponsorship for a trip to I/O one year in place of our typical trips.

The presentations and material are great but there are a lot of attendees there who are not developers which makes a lot of the interactions confusing. TBH if there were more developers there I'm not sure I would be been able to get a seat or stand for that matter at a lot of the technical presentations.

Every stereotype of the tech industry being a male dominated monoculture was reinforced. Very (very) few women, and general racial/ethnic imbalances not reflective of Google or the wider world.

As I alluded to, I'd recommend going primarily if you think you'll get value from interacting with interesting people there. I'm big on Android, but my highlight of last year was chatting to a Chrome dev relations guy about their approach to profiling, so it is the pleasant surprises that are the main takeaways.

How is Google supposed to address that? And why is it relevant to getting value from the conference?

The few female developers I know tend to resent the fact that the only women they meet at conferences are marketers, thereby ruining the chances other attendees will treat them as developers. It does not help developers to invite more marketers or recruiters in order to achieve gender balance.

The question is: who on earth cares about the demographics of a conference? You go there to get information, so why should you care about who the people sitting in the hall are, especially given the fact that you won't see them ever again?

In order to be allowed to buy a ticket they should have a simple dynamically-generated programming challenge so non-programmers can't search for the exact answer. Maybe some kind of dynamically generated boolean math problem to be implemented with if-else statements.

A regex should just about cover it.

There are a large number of developers that still ask me "How do you do <simple thinghere> in regex?" quite often. I think that your suggestion may be narrowing the crowd a bit much.

Isn't that the point? :)

You should have to write a working Juniper configuration to establish a peering session at an exchange with YouTube.

Then non-network engineers wouldn't be grabbing up all the tickets.

Tech world's equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru.

They could just integrate http://codecha.org/. "Codecha: Prove you're human through your code."

Really cool idea, but something seems up with the is_even() python question. A valid solution is not passing the site's validation.

Google IO is not only for programmers though.

Even without attending it, I am looking forward to see if there are presentations about ART and improving the state of Java on Android.

Now with Java 8 out, it is pretty lame that one still needs to use a Java 6 fork to target the majority of Android devices.

SDK Tools, Revision 22.6 (March 2014) added support for Java 7 language features. You use Java 7 to build.

"features like multi-catch, try-with-resources, and the diamond operator. " - [1]

[1] - http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/tools-notes.html

Only works with Android 4.4!

Odd...

"This page has been blocked from accessing your microphone."

I don't have headphones on, and I see no other indication as to why they'd want to access my mic. Weird.

At the bottom right-hand corner of the page when it loads it tells me:

"Explore technology and its impact from small to large through tapping, spinning and making sound.

It seems that making noise causes the animation to do things.

Any big announcements rumored for this year's I/O, e.g. Android 5.0, Nexus 6 phone, 12" tablet, more offline services (Maps, Docs, etc.)?

I tried a couple of times to get in, failed, and resigned myself to watching the presentations and tutorials online for free. That's fine. Say what you will, Google gives away a lot of knowledge for free and I have benefited greatly.

Can't wait till June.

There won't be a Nexus phone, those are announced at the end of the year usually. No one is expecting 5.0, though they usually do release a partial update every six months (maybe another KitKat, like the three JellyBean releases).

They usually release new tablets around I/O.

Hmm, that website is extremely slow for me (on Firefox).

Straight up crashes it for me.

Yes repeatedly crashes FireFox.

Yeah; me too.

WFM on FFox 29, albeit slow.

consinstent crash too, they must have tried really hard to find such a bug

That's by design. They only want Chrome users to come to the event.

They do this across all their services and had been doing so for years. They really want you to use their (shitty) browser. I don't blame them though, it's just irritating to see people praise them as a "good" corporation that does no unnecessary evil.

Well the page crashes my Firefox, so slowness is not that bad ;)

This page crashes my browser (FF 28 in Ubuntu). Ooops.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Yes; same thing. Weird.

Typically, they give presale access to repeat attendees ("Ions") before the general public gets access. As an Ion, there's incentive to go every year if only to maintain your ability to go next year (nevermind interacting with the Googlers who build the APIs you rely or the hardware seeding, clearly also benefits).

Wonder if they've scrapped that this year too.

That was only for people who have attended every I/O.

Personally, I'm glad they switched to the lottery. I had the worst experience last year. Got a ticket after refreshing the page for a half hour, but then Google Wallet was broken so it wouldn't let me pay for it (cart expires in 5 minutes). Hopefully they can handle the server load spread out over 2 days this time.

I still don't think Lottery is the best possible solution but yes it it one step better than last year.

The console logging going on is pretty dang funny...

The morse code (-... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--. / -... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--.) translates to "BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP".

I'm fascinated by the dotted countdown clock at the bottom of the page. It took me a while to figure out exactly what it was, and I got lost in Wikipedia reading about how braille is represented in unicode, thinking it had something to do with that.

My guess is that the first set in dark blue is days remaining, followed by hours in purple, minutes in green, and seconds in light blue. Haven't quite wrapped my head around which dot represents what value, but it sure does look cool.

It's just simple binary, representing the days, hours, minutes, seconds

days do not have an upper bound; therefore you see 8bits on the most left position. Hours can be at most 24, so 7th bit is not present, minutes&seconds can be at most 60 so 8th bit is not present etc...

Interesting they're doing a lottery for registration. I'm sure it'll reduce server load though.

Also, I love the binary countdown at the bottom of the page.

Did anyone else notice the Doge messages in the console?

Some pretty silly lines in there:

Object {

boson1: "Reticulating Splines..."

boson2: "There's more Ajax in this loader than an epic greek poem"

boson3: "♬ Reunited and it feels so good"

boson4: "Are you there, Boson? It's me, Margaret."

boson5: "♬ Is he a dot, or is he a speck? When he's underwater does he get wet?"

exo1: ""Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." - Carl Sagan"

exo2: "Call me V'Ger"

exo3: "As far as we know, the universe is not Tail Call optimized."

exo-argon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Argon"

exo-bleu: "Detecting: Class H Planet Bleu"

exo-cheddarwurst: "Discovered: Class D Planet Cheddarwurst"

exo-daytripper: "Located: Class M Planet Day Tripper"

exo-dunebuggy: "Detecting: Class D Planet Dune Buggy"

exo-emanthaler: "Located: Class D Planet Emmentaler"

exo-hoth: "Investigating: Class K Planet Hoth"

exo-izod: "Detecting: Class D Planet Golf"

exo-lacoste: "Discovered: Class D Planet Lines"

exo-meangreenie: "Investigating: Class J Planet Mean Greenie"

exo-measels: "Located: Class L Planet Measels"

exo-mumps: "Investigating: Class L Planet Mumps"

exo-neon: "Detecting: Class J Planet Neon"

exo-polo: "Discovered: Class D Planet Colors"

exo-purplehaze: "Discovered: Class D Planet Purple Haze"

exo-tatooine: "Located: Class M Planet Tatooine"

exo-xenon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Xenon"

exo-ziggystardust: "Located: Class L Planet Ziggy Stardust"

neural-banana: "Orange you glad I didn't say banana (╯°□°）╯"

neural-boom: "♬ All we hear is, radio ga ga"

neural-can: "It's got what plants crave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbxq0IDqD04"

neural-cat: "Cat Proximity: https://xkcd.com/262/"

neural-doge: "WONTFIX: Duplicate Doge joke"

neural-mona: "It's cool and all, but I'm more into his older stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo_da_Vi...

neural-nes: "What's the fastest TAS you can complete for the I/O 2014 website?"

neural-pong: "Can you do this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8IVASo0umU"

neural-rhex: "Awwww, he's a cute little guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI"

neural-ufo: "Teach the controversy!"

neuralfail0: "Hint: The eyeball follows the correct diamonds"

neuralfail1: "ಠ_ಠ You could scrape the code for patterns, but you should probably get back to work."

neuralfail2: "Hi HackerNews, I dare you not to complain about something involving Big O Notation."

planet1: "I think I can see my house from here."

planet2: "Our apologies to any visitors who suffer from Globophobia."

planet3: "TCP/IP is cool and all, but did I think "IP over Avian Carriers" would be way more fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers"

planet4: "-... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--. / -... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--."

silicon1: "Little known fact: Silicon looks exactly like a beachball under a microscope"

silicon2: " wow↵ such structure↵ so crystalline↵ many atom↵ how connect"

silicon3: "FIXME: Remember to write a joke about silicon"

silicon4: "It's only a model."

}

The morse code is just 'beep boop beep boop'.

     wow
           such structure
 so crystalline
              many atom
         how connect

The jokes are pretty lame, to be honest. But at least the sound stops when you click on another tab.

I was completely repelled to register on the first line itself in info about registration : https://www.google.com/events/io/help#!/registration

"You will need to sign into Google+ to begin the registration application." #pushItUpTheirThroatsTillPeopleStartGagging

Make sure to enter the "lottery" with a company or app publishing account email if possible. Just polling people in the industry last time, people with emails from popular press and media often had no trouble at all. A possible reason is a whitelist for certain email domains.

The thing I first paid attention to was that there is no longer a mad dash to sign up in the first 10 seconds, but they pick people at random from those who apply in the first 2 days. I might actually make it for once!

I predict we will now see greater adoption on google wallet, since having a bunch of google wallets with virtual credit card numbers effectively gives you more tickets to the lottery. Sneaky plot by google there.

You could see that you can scroll down to page from the beginning but i somehow expected the animation to take me to those information below step by step. But instead animation started from the beginning again.

The minigames remind me a lot about Year Walk's finale :) http://youtu.be/tD6ZROIlZhU?t=16m11s

In the countdown clock at the bottom, I hate when two decimal digits are displayed with two separate binary digits.

39(base 10) does not equal 011,1001

39 == 0100111

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal

I'm guessing Apple will do the same lottery for WWDC this year, that's what they did for Tech Talks a few months ago.

As far as I can remember the tech talks have always been a lottery.

How you are you guys, not from US, make it to these kind of events? Isn't obtaining visas and so on a problem?

Why would you need a visa to attend a conference? You don't need a visa to travel, and I think people travel for business all the time.

That's actually not true, it depends on what country you're from. By default, you need a visa to enter the US, even for short visits. However, if you're from one of the countries on this page, then the visa requirement is waived for visits < 90 days:

http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/visit/visa-wai...

If you meet some additional criteria (mentioned on the page as well). Also many of the countries were added just recently (2008).

Thanks! I really did want to learn about this, and phrased my post all wrong. I really appreciate the information.

> You don't need a visa to travel, and I think people travel for business all the time.

What?you obviously dont know what you are talking about.

wow, I clearly should have rephrased that. I actually didn't have any idea what I was talking about and was curious to find out more. I see now that I wrote that all wrong, the question didn't sound like a question.

I've never been before; this will (hopefully) be my first time, but my excuse is that I can combine in with some geeky sightseeing in the US.

Lottery goes from April 8 - April 10th.

Why do they need microphone access?

For the little interactive animation at the top of the page. Makes some things bounce around - the spinning satellite is one.

Those animations and swags on the website are totally useless and anti-informatic!

anyone know how much $$ required to attend if chosen by lottery system ?

The usual pricing: $900, $300 for students.

When you sign up you have to have a Google Wallet account so that your ticket is automatically purchased if you're chosen.

Thank you.

I hope they will finally announce Chrome with built in Dart vm.

Binary clock countdown to registration is pretty cool.

Let's hope that they release Glass in June 25.

I wonder if Google has plans for a competing VR to the rift.

I can't wait for Google's fleet of personal spy drones to violate my privacy even further.

You have no expectation of privacy while in public.

Actually I do expect a certain degree of privacy while in public. No everyone is comfortable with Google spying and data mining everything they can get their hands on.

Are they ready to release that?

I was going to get the development version. Should I wait after June 25?

I wonder if anyone will talk about Android issues covered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456540

I am super impressed and amazed.

DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED TO GET THE MOBILE PAGE TO APPEAR WITHOUT A TOOLBAR IN MOBILE SAFARI??? Wow. I have never seen this. I want to be able to do it also.

The screen starts off with the browser controls already minimized, even when the page hasn't scrolled yet.

Also when you scroll down, the bottom toolbar never appears, and it doesn't have the typical problem of showing the toolbar when you tap on the bottom part of the screen. How do they pull this off?

EDIT: I looked at the page. Is it this? <meta content="minimal-ui" name="viewport">

The minimal-ui thing was just added in iOS 7.1

i dont feel smart enough for this website

How about covering this google: shame on developers for using the api that end users use: https://twitter.com/duhroach/status/421678850049728512 We don't have choice, as you don't nuge updates.

Andorid is thew new IE!

OK, I've scrolled all the way down, seen some nice colors and heard some nice music. But where's the info about Google I/O?

Seriously, I didn't even try to read the text on the page because its overall mood implies the text is not important at all.

This site simply looks like someone's homework rather than an info site for a conference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com