Daredevilry, Fun and Technology Promise — Google I/O 2012 Wrap Up

The Claritics team came back from the Google I/O event very excited about many of the cutting edge technologies and innovations in developer tools and cloud based platforms — that could inspire and impact Web 3.0 cloud based tools and apps development in the days ahead. This blog post will highlight a few of those which we think have great potential in the days ahead.

The keynotes (other than the most talked about skydiving stunt showcasing Google Glass) showcased further advances in the Android ecosystem (Jelly Beans 4.1,the new Nexus 7 tablet, the Nexus Q a spherical streaming device) and Google cloud advancements including realtime cloud sync, search enhancements around text and images in PDF docs. The integration of all of these components (search, video, voice recognition, calendar, maps etc.) around the Android devices and Google Play store was fascinating and much tighter compared to a year back.

Futuristic Technologies and Tools

A look at the future of Dart, GWT, and other web-language preprocessors

• Dart is Google’s new language designed to compete with Javascript for large-scale, structured web apps, and interfaces directly with the browser. While Dart aims to have its own runtime supported natively in browsers (i.e. chrome), it is still in its early stages, and is currently mostly used as a preprocessor to Javascript with its Dart2JS compiler
• The GWT Project focuses on compiling java code into optimized javascript code, and is used internally on several Google projects, including AdWords
  • Though Google’s Dart team is pushing for the adoption of their new language, Google still plans to support GWT for the foreseeable future, and is scheduled to release a major new version sometime this month
  • The GWT project also pitched the use of the SourceMaps standard for languages that compile to Javascript / CSS (Dart, GWT, CoffeeScript, Sass, Less, etc), which would allow developers to easily debug their original preprocessor code directly in their browser’s debug tools, as all the compiled output and errors would be mapped back directly to the original source files.

New Web Tools and advanced CSS3/HTML5 features (from Adobe and Google)

• Innovative new features such as CSS Regions, Exclusions, Shaders, Compositing
  • New tool that allows you play around and create these effects in HTML5
• Brackets
  • An Open source project
  • A code editor for HTML, CSS and JavaScript that’s built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript
  • Quick Edit UI in Brackets puts context-specific code and tools inline
  • Push code edits instantly which mean always in sync
• Adobe Shadow Labs Release 3
  • New inspection and preview tool from adobe for front-end developers and designers for mobile web projects
  • Streamlines the preview process, making it easier to customize websites for mobile devices. Supported for Mac, MS Windows, Android, iOS
  • Can connect multiple devices for simultaneous testing eg. Android phone, iPad, iPhone, Desktop, Laptop
  • If running on your desktop/laptop/any one device, you can
    • take screenshots from these devices
    • clear cache from these devices

Chrome Developer tools

With Chrome gaining a lot of traction, the Chrome team showcased some powerful features that can help a developer improve an app’s UI performance further. One such feature is the Heap Graph which could be very helpful in keeping check on app memory performance. The real time editing with the help of the buckets text editor was another awesome feature.

Storytelling using Data

This was a funny and a well-organised presentation from the team that develops the Google Charts Library. They showcased some interesting use-cases from data-exploration to storytelling. One example that stood out was the story of a speaker’s relationship status over the years and its representation using the HTML5 charts and dashboards that their team had been working on.

Fun Booths at the Developer Sandbox

This booth showcased a game from Primer Labs, CodeHero, which taught you how to make a game! It was based on Unity3D and had slick gaming mechanics. Every player examines and shoots actual code snippets floating in the arena and in the process building that very game itself. We examine the code snippets which increase in complexity as the game moves on. It could be a great tool for beginners as well for developers needing rapid game development.

There was an interesting Google experiment that caught our attention which relied on HTML5 web sockets and WebGL that allowed us to play and hear those musical instruments thousands of miles away.

On the fun side – we watched Cubify 3D printers churn out 3D models of Android bots, while the team was nice enough to hand out some personalized souvenirs!

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