Google I/O 2014
google.com
google.com
Still looks nice, but that was mean.
Were you not around when they came out?
* They're obviously putting a lot of effort into listening to their customers and implementing their feedback (see windows 8.2 changes, start bar is coming back, metro apps will now be windowed) (also see this article by Gabe at Penny arcade about how Microsoft implemented his feedback for the Surface Pro 3 http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/16/surface-pro...).
* They realise the cloud is the future and they're making great strides towards making sure Azure is the best cloud platform available. I've used Amazon's AWS, Rackspace and Azure. Azure is hands down the best. Nadella was formerly in charge of Azure, so it's no surprise that Azure is coming to the forefront of Microsoft. The interface for their new cloud control panel is excellent (http://portal.azure.com https://i.imgur.com/SxdPZjf.png).
* Developers, developers, developers is back in season! They're open sourcing everything. ASP.NET, MVC, their new C# compiler are all now open source. The UI library they used to make the website above is open source (WinJS https://github.com/winjs/winjs). They are making obvious efforts to engage the developer community.
* Whilst everybody else is scrambling to create walled gardens and closed platforms, Microsoft is going in the opposite direction. All of their recent open source releases have been on Github, not Codeplex. You can provision linux virtual machines, mysql database, redis caches on azure - as well as the Microsoft equivalents. They just announced they're making an Android handset after acquiring Nokia, as well as Windows Phone. They've announced that they will start supporting officially supporting Mono (open source version of their .NET clr) with new releases of ASP.NET, allowing ASP.NET applications to run on open source platforms.
* Their share price is the highest it's been in 15 years
EDIT:
* And as much as I hate to admit it (I haven't personally switched browsers or search providers yet...) but they're actually fixing the problems with Bing and Internet Explorer, and seem to be rapidly catching up with the pack. The new developer tools for IE actually look pretty good (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ie/bg182326.aspx) and Bing is not looking too shabby either.
"[Google Manager]: Guys... Could you make it modern, like Microsoft Metro, but maybe decrease the padding between tiles and maybe add some blurry shadows."
"[Designers]: but shadows are a violation flat design principles!"
"[Google Manager]: I am sorry, but we cannot come across like complete rip-offs".
Have we reached a point where anyone using color is ripping off windows? :/
Superficially yes but it's really just a new coat of paint on top of a slightly revised UI. My eyes instantly glaze over looking at these screenshots because we have this boring font combined with a boring use of whitespace with little variation in text size. It's all the bad parts of Metro / Modern UI without any of the good parts.
From my point of view, if you're competing heavily on design then you're in the business of a commodity and hence have no better technological or use-case differentiator... And/or you're swept up by the cult of design as of late.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/19/apple-awarded-pate...
‘What if there was a material as simple as paper that could change shape based on touch? I’m not saying there is. But what if there were?’
I was pretty disappointed to find out that I was right.
In which case, your machine may also be hibernating, which is slow to being with. So something like automatically unlocking while your phone is around isn't really all that useful.
Not to mention, how long does it take to type in a password?
On a tangent, I'm really excited about this and hope there's a Windows+Android version on the way (or clone)...
I'd carry a tiny wearable for this.
The short movie "Sight" is a great demonstration of our potential near future of augemented reality technology and the effect it might have on our social lives: http://vimeo.com/46304267
http://www.motorola.com/us/accessory-family-page-1/Motorola-...
There are options for this functionality out there, of course, but they've not been adopted much by users.
I've been using it for the past 6 months and it went from futuristic novelty to now daily use.
For me, having a lock screen at work/home is useless and just an annoyance. It's a pain always having to enable it when I leave work/home so this feature is perfect for me.
It's pretty good, though I have to remember to take my phone with me when I leave my desk at work for an extended period of time.
It's nice to be able to walk up to my desk, tap my phone while it's in my pocket and see the computer unlock.
Let's face it, the only impressive tech stuff here today was the cloud debugging. Everything else was fluff. Frankly Amazon put on far more dangerous looking displays of technology prowess these days.
And we still can't mention China. Disappointing, but somewhat inevitable.
I'm hoping for some more stable AS releases and a plan for a 1.0.0 soon.
Session title: "What’s new in Android development tools", 9:00 AM
https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule/session/ac46ad42-1...
I was happy with the auto integration, but didn't really think it was tremendously new. The new design stuff raised more questions than answers for me.
All they can do is tell me if I walked or not. I KNOW IF I WALKED OR NOT. If I wanted to walk more I'd get another dog, not a watch.
I also like DIRECTLY AFTER they show the pedometer they order a pizza. I just can't imagine a world where these are good ideas. I'd love to have been in on those meetings to throw staplers at the people who suggested these things.
It can't tell me whether I've walked or not, and I can't order a pizza with it, but I get all my notifications on it, which alone is very handy (pun not necessarily intended) for me.
99% of the time, I'm using the "tablet features" of my phone. I maybe get 3-5 calls a month.
A phone-watch would suffice for this.
If it could tell the time, provide me with notifications, has vibration and can tell if I move or not, this would be perfect.
The rest of the information I would consume with my tablet.
While all these micro-iterations on technology are great, and we have some amazing toys, I can't help but think that humanity is getting too DISCONNECTED from EARTH.
There's literally no way that today's battery density (or even in several years) is high enough to support more than a dozen calls, not to mention all the radios a cell phone requires (just think antenna length, not space).
I wouldn't expect a viable standalone phone-watch until 2025 barring significant advances in battery technology and cell antenna design.
The scenario seems to be you walk halfway somewhere, fill up on junk food, then order a Uber cab home...
Personally I prefer when google shows weak propositions instead of just prescribing everything people want to do/will do.
Huh? They clearly demoed it doing all sorts of things. Besides, it's not like this is a brand new category, Pebble watches and the like have been doing this for a while, but they've been a niche product. A larger manufacturer might change that.
I can see that I got a text message on my Pebble. Awesome. The problem was I couldn't do anything with it. Can't dismiss it on the phone. Can't reply to it.
Android Wear looks like it addresses the major problems I have with my Pebble. If pricing looks sane there's a good chance I'll be ordering on of the watches going up for sale today.
Also, changing music or volume when on a bus without having to do that thing where you lift your bum to get your phone out of your pocket is, well, better than it sounds.
Do Android phones still come without buttons on their headphones?
I think those who normally wear a watch will be excited by this, and perhaps that is a big enough market to make it worthwhile?
It's not about getting a dog as much as having something that archive (your memory sucks at that) and tells you if you have the regularity that such a responsability entails: I can't. I can tell you I got home after 10 more than half the past month, but not because I remember it: because Moves let me see so.
They make it very difficult to both follow their latest UI guidelines and the older ones (because adoption rates lag quite a bit).
Android is rife with clear evidence that the project has no design guidelines. All of the UIs change completely in every release.
I think the other part of the problem is that Android demonstrates what happens when you let developers run wild, as much as it pains me to say that. As developers we always want new, new, new! Rip out the old stuff! But we don't always think about the consequences that has on customers. Or I should say, in a typical company you quickly learn that you can't just change things on a whim. Google is not typical though...
Mobile is the most competitive market on the planet right now. Eye candy is essential to showing growth and momentum. Most people aren't looking under the hood, particularly now that hardware specs are leveling off.
The design changeover is being driven from the top. Ever since Steve Jobs has died and Larry took over as CEO, he's gotten the design religion, and his goal is for Google's design to remain fresh and drive trends forward perpetually. So as far as the company is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug.
It's true that the individual designers responsible for doing the design often vary from project to project. However, there's a fair amount of continuity as well. The designer who initiated the design refresh announced today has been with the company since 2006; the designer I worked with for the visual refresh of 2010 now heads up design for all of Search. They are explicitly told by executives to make things fresh and remove previous constraints when imagining the new Google.
Snark aside, I think you're seeing two effects. One is designers wanting to be creative and innovative (which is a top-down directive) without also talking with their counterparts in other areas of the company. This will get corrected over time; periodically the company tries to line up all of its products so that they're consistent across all of Google. The last major such project was Kennedy; Quantum is the next one, so I suspect Android G+ will eventually change to conform with the Quantum styleguides just announced.
The other effect is that design rules are different for big companies than they are for small app developers. Small app developers want to fit in with the platform styleguides, because they face intense competition, are only a tiny part of the total ecosystem, and so if they deviate from the expected UI it only harms themselves. Big companies want to set the standards, and so they encourage their designers to be bold and adventurous, in the hopes of creating the trends. And the Android G+ app has been a trendsetter in the past; some of the recent move towards very image-heavy apps (across both web and mobile) was pioneered by them back around 2011 and 2012.
presumably the week before the next UI paradigm is announced at I/O 2016...
Honeycomb was introduced in 2011. That's three years.
And besides, Android is on design iteration #3, Apple is on #2, and I think most would agree iOS was aged pretty badly by the time it got #2.
Personally, I find Android's 2.x design about as much as a design as a factory floor's sounds 'music'.
Is this the root cause of why Google Maps/Nav on Android had a giant UX regression from 6.x to 7.x and still sucks so bad that my next phone may very well be a Lumia?
What does this even mean? It reminds me of the design-by-committee meeting to add Poochie to Itchy and Scratchy. "It needs to be more dynamic. More proactive. More ATTITUDE!"
That seems a little unfair - they are going to extraordinary lengths to spell out design rules - to the point of publishing entire voluminous web sites about it:
A huge chunk of the presentation was about their philosophy. You might not like it, but they are definitely trying.
Apps trail OS capabilities, too. So while it may be inconvenient for developers, rapid change is probably a fact of life.
It has all the energy of someone reading a press release.
EDIT: Unbelievable: they all look at the prompter like it were natural. I really cannot believe this is the most important Google public event and the speakers do not learn their stuff by heart.
Vic Gundotra and Hugo Barra are among the all time worst speakers at Google I/O. This year it again feels like developers talking to developers. Delightful! :)
I hate iOS7 enough that my next phone will definitely be an android. But in the meantime...
I understand there are thousands of people there but that particular camera makes it look like a bunch of people are leaving as the speaker speaks.
Disclaimer: I work in the video space.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21921790/best-approach-to...
That's a very bad way of stating it. It's perfectly possible, and "supported" even though there is no "use this thing" solution for it. The problem is that you can't rely on a full solution being usable by all browsers you want to target.
They all do the same thing fundamentally; the only differences are slight technical details and who is in control of the standard.
[0]http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/videoformatsuppor... [1]https://www.youtube.com/html5 - This shows 6/6
Source: I own a Glass and barely wear it.
Oh yeah, and how we aren't getting upgraded to the 2GB version even though I paid $1,600 for it during their "one day sale." Its almost like Google is trying to kill Glass.
That'll show me to walk around outside like a tool, defending Google as I wear Glass.
"ART: ... Truly cross platform: ARM, x86, MIPS"
Sounds like they may be setting up to make a proper run at the desktop market? Now that all these Windows 8 machines are out there with cheap touch panels, it's shown that cheap desktop/laptop computers can exist with the necessary interface bits to work.
edit:and watches and cars apparently
Dalvik, and Dalvik's JIT compiler are definitely tuned for small batteries.
The Dalvik JIT compiler focuses on critical sections of code. There's a reason you don't see Hotspot on battery powered devices.
Large amounts of the Android framework, especially the foundations of drawing and the View hierarchy, are in C or C++. Compiling an interactive app to native code makes much less difference in performance than a synthetic benchmark of DEX interpretation might lead one to think.
Hotspot get its name from the term of art for a critical section of code, though. That's not something that makes them different from each other; it's what they have in common.
What separates them must be that only one of them was designed with a power budget in mind.
I wonder why neither Page nor Brin came on stage.
I think this might be because they've either changed strategic direction or are awaiting an overhaul of senior management, what with the Nest acquisition and Vic and Hugo's departures and all. I think the stuff that they had to announce today was simply a lagging indicator of their current direction.
Clever showman.
EDIT: Why the downvotes? Gundotra was a good showman. Hangouts also removed features from Talk, eg. is someone actually online when I want to talk to them. Was this wrong? Or was someone angry about these facts?
MOTOACTV is also a precursor to this wearable watches, pretty much capable at least the notifications. Nonetheless, this was more sports oriented.
It so sad that now for Google Motorola is not a poster child, but something that they try to forget about it.
I had such high hopes for a Google-owned Motorola too.
Or are they counting how many times they make calls to a part of the API? Like calling a function in a for loop or something?
Either way, I'll applaud unnecessarily.
EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes! Here's to humour on HN!
http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/23599/20140625/google-...
Edit: corrected name of iOS for cars
It's unreadable.
Why would they want to get involved in that market?
They sell games. They sell hardware on which people play games. They sell a set-top device that plays games. But they don't sell an actual controller for that device.
Their core competency is marketing / search / ads, so I suppose the entire Android system and any hardware could be considered a side show?
BTW, I am a happy Android user (other than Maps and Talk, which have gone down the toilet).
Sounds like they're about six months in to the project, and will have something to show in the next month or so.
Couple that with the fact that it takes a good two years before the latest Android version is on a majority of devices and it's no wonder why devs throw their hands up when faced with having to support potentially three sets of UI look and feel guidelines at any given time.
According to the Android Platform Version Dashboard[0], 84.3% of Android users are running Android 4.0+ and Google has been adding support for many of their new APIs and design functionality to their support libraries. It's safe to say that the only applications on the Play Store that still use the Gingerbread buttons or odd custom widgets/widgets copied from iOS are lazy developers. There simply is no excuse for ignoring the style guidelines anymore.
[0]: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
Uh, and this one they're talking about now.
> 84.3% of Android users are running Android 4.0+
And it only took nearly 3 years to pull that off...
> There simply is no excuse for ignoring the style guidelines anymore.
Yes there is: the fact that at any point in time you have to follow two or more style guidelines. Let's say I want to make a new app today targeting the new UI look and feel Google has just released. Since only a tiny fraction of Android devices are going to be running that latest version I need to target the current UI look and feel and the previous one. Bits and pieces can be bridged with the compatibility library but now that means you're saddled with programming against the compatibility library for several years. Every UI refresh brings along with it extra technical debt that developers are burdened with -- even small ones like notification bar icon changes (which happened in 2.2 -> 2.3). Take a look at last year's Google I/O app. This is the asset management required to create a "best of breed" Android app that targets as many devices as possible:
https://github.com/google/iosched/tree/master/android/src/ma...
Ho-lee shit, what a nightmare. Can you blame developers for being lazy? It's hard enough just knowing what's expected of you to make an application that can a) run on a majority of devices, b) look good on said devices, and c) make use of new APIs.
> Take a look at last year's Google I/O app. This is the asset management required to create a "best of breed" Android app that targets as many devices as possible:
Ummm, I don't see what you're getting at here. These assets have been the case for most versions of Android. That folder contains portrait and landscape layouts, drawables for the different device sizes (and hidpi), and translations. If you would like users to be able to user your application in other languages, you have to provide translated strings somehow. If you would like to have different portrait and landscape layouts, you have to include those layout files. That's just expected regardless of your platform. It's hardly a nightmare. You aren't required to support other languages and Android will do it's best to rearrange your interface for landscape and scale your drawables appropriately. This just allows developers to have a greater degree of flexibility and customization to ensure that their applications run well no matter the device size, orientation, or language.
It's all documented in great detail at in the Android documentation[0].
0: https://developer.android.com/training/basics/supporting-dev...
They made the point that Play Services are up to date on 90-something percent of devices, which is good, as they silently push it out without telling you (usually to leave you surprised when you open Play and it looks entirely different), probably as a response to Apple's taunt in their keynote regarding the number of users on recent iOS and OSX versions.
It looks super-awesome, though. I want it on interesting devices. I won’t be able to get it, though.
I really hope its not true. I love my Nexus devices.
So, because of this - I've decided ill root it.
While this doesn't affect the experience on stock Google devices, phones such as the Nexus line represent a crushingly small share of the market, so it doesn't matter.
In addition, I don't understand the pivot towards elevation. The industry has been moving towards flat design. I like flat. It's simple. Less design is often better than more deisgn.
The new Gmail design is a great example of this. The current design is simple. Information is there as soon as you open the application. The new design has increased usage of whitespace and a larger action bar, not to mention that intrusive icon in the bottom right.
There hasn't been a single thing about this year's I/O that has impressed me, or pleased me for that matter. Disappointed that Google continues to pump out new features instead of perfecting the ones they already have.
The way I currently see it, you have Apple putting out less features with incredible levels of polish, or Google throwing features at the wall until something sticks and then only enhancing it a little (i.e. Hangouts).
I was absolutely relieved to see the elevation parts of the new design. Flat looks good, but it's been headed to an extreme recently. I can't stand the near total flatness of parts iOS7/8; it makes it very difficult for me to visually distinguish content.
http://cdn1.appleinsider.com/13.06.17-Calendar-2.jpg
The navigation bar in general just looks like a mass of text to me most of the time, especially if there are more than two tabs:
http://www.okilla.com/uploadfile/1/2013/07/10/11373456479/13...
EDIT:
And no, I don't have similar issues on Android. Part of that could be the move to side drawers in Android apps. The greater contrast and lower reliance on lines as visual separators is definitely part of it as well.
I can only imagine how my mum gets on with it. The removal of buttons to do things is another thing - how the heck do you remove a bookmark in Safari on iOS? Ah yes, swipe sideways of course. This took me hours to discover. I am all for simplicity, but not for removal of hints/controls.
The Calendar application on OSX is now a big white blob. I could just stick a piece of blank A4 paper to my screen and get the same effect.
It distresses me, as you can tell. I shouldn't be squinting when using an application on a computer, or fumbling around with an iPad like it's a children's noisy toy or toy phone / etch-a-sketch. If they added beep boop boop beep wheeee noises then it'd complete the effect.