Tag Archives: google i/o

A great day for Android at Google I/O; not convinced by Google TV

Yesterday’s Google I/O was remarkable for several reasons. The most significant was not a specific technical announcement, but rather the evidence for a successful Google-led alliance against Apple in the mobile device market (and perhaps also in home entertainment with Google TV). Apple has hardly put a foot wrong since Jobs rejoined the company in 1996 – well, aside from a few minor lapses like the iPod Hi-Fi. With steadily increasing sales for the iPhone, it was beginning to look as if Apple would do to the mobile phone market what it did to the market for portable MP3 players, including the all-important App Store.

After Google I/O 2010 that seems less likely. Google showed off the momentum behind Android – there are now over 100,000 Android activations daily, according to Vic Gundotra – and then gave a compelling demo of new features in Android 2.2, code-named Froyo, including:

  • New Dalvik just-in-time compiler with 2-5x speed improvement in CPU-bound code
  • Better Exchange support with account auto-discovery, calendar sync, Global Address List support, and device policy support
  • V8 JavaScript engine in Android browser, 2-3x speed improvement
  • Apps can backup data to the cloud, for instant restore on a replacement device
  • Ability to make Android phone a portable wi-fi hotspot for your Windows, Apple or Linux machine
  • Stream your home media library to your Android device
  • Cloud to device messaging
  • Crash reports with stacktrace uploaded for developers to review
  • Some great demos of voice input combined with Google search and maps

In some ways the details do not matter; what does matter is that Google persuaded the world that Android mobiles would be more than a match for iPhones, but without the Apple lock-in, lock-out, and censorship.

Support for Adobe Flash is almost more a political than a technical matter in this context. I cannot help wondering whether Microsoft is working on Silverlight for Android; it should be, but probably is not. The Mono team on the other hand is there already.

Apple now has a bit of a PR problem; and while I am sure it will ride it out successfully and impress us at WWDC next month, the fact that it has a PR problem at all is something of a novelty.

Next came Google TV, with which I was less impressed, and not only because the demos were shaky. I understand the thinking behind it. You could almost see the $ signs revolving when Google mentioned the $70 billion annual spend on TV advertising. Google TV adds an Android device and internet connection to your living room television set, bringing YouTube to the largest screen in the house, enabling web browsing, and opening up interesting opportunities such as running Android apps, combining TV and web search, and overlaying TV with social media interaction.

It sounds good; but while I am a firm believer in the Internet’s power to disrupt broadcasting – especially here in the UK where we have BBC iPlayer – I am not sure that injecting the Web into TV like this is such a big deal. In fact, games consoles do this already. Sony’s Howard Stringer was at Google I/O to support the announcement, which has his company’s participation, but a PS3 already offers BBC iPlayer, Adobe Flash 9, and a basic web browser. I use this from time to time and enjoy it, but a TV is not great for web browsing since you are sitting at a distance, and wireless keyboards are a nuisance kicking round the living room – we tried that for a while with Windows Media Center. Activities like online shopping or simply Tweeting are easier to do on other devices.

Maybe it is just waiting for the right implementation. If it does take off though, I will be interested to see what the broadcasters think of it. What if Google manages to serve contextual ads based on the content you are viewing? That would not please me if I had invested millions in creating that content, specifically in order to attract advertising.

It may be developers that make or break Google TV. Add a few compelling apps that work best in this context, and we will all want one.

Google advances its platform – or should that be advances the Web?

Yesterday Google presented its latest platform innovations at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Its strategy is relatively clear: to improve web applications so that you can do everything you need in the browser. The client pieces are HTML 5 – though bear in mind that this is not yet a fixed standard – and especially the Chrome browser, whether installed on a traditional operating system or delivered on a Chrome OS device.

Chrome has always had lightning-fast JavaScript. We’re now seeing other pieces in the Chrome-as-application-platform story, including:

Integrated Adobe Flash

The  Native Client for secure native code, typically coded in C/C++, running in the browser

Announced yesterday, the WebM video and audio format. This includes VP8, acquired with On2 Technologies and now open source, as well as Vorbis audio and the Matroska multimedia container.

The Chrome Web Store, also announced yesterday, which will be an App Store equivalent for web applications.

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Web Store apps are “installable” which may mean little more than a shortcut in the browser, similar to a bookmark or favourite link. However, there will be a payment infrastructure as well as ratings and user reviews.

Serverless apps. This is another aspect to the Web Store. A Web Store app can be designed to run offline, with all the necessary HTML and JavaScript bundled into the .crx format used by the store. Google calls these Serverless apps, and in many ways the concept is similar to that in Palm’s WebOS – HTML and JavaScript applications that run locally. This is interesting for Chrome OS as it makes it easy to create applications that work offline.

The Google Font API and Directory. This is big news. Most of us stick to the same old web fonts, or use images, or a plug-in like Flash or PDF, for going beyond the standard browser fonts. Using Google’s API, it is easy to include any font in the new directory, with nothing more than a specially crafted CSS link.

The Google Font API hides a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Google’s serving infrastructure takes care of converting the font into a format compatible with any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 6 and up), sends just the styles and weights you select, and the font files and CSS are tuned and optimized for web serving.

On the server side, there is Google App Engine for Business. Google is cooperating with VMware so that you can host Spring applications on its web application platform, App Engine. Spring Roo, a rapid application development tool for Spring, has been integrated with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to make it easy to build browser-hosted clients for Spring applications. GWT lets you code in Java, but run in JavaScript. Using Spring gives you a choice of where to host your application: on-premise, on App Engine, on the Salesforce.com platform with VMforce, or on another platform such as Amazon EC2.

Spring’s Rod Johnson explains the goals here:

Until the announcement of VMforce and today’s announcement, Java developers lacked a PaaS destination to which they could easily deploy their applications. This was an important gap that threatened to become a danger to the long-term future of Java. I’m delighted that VMware/SpringSource is leading the charge to fill this gap.

Another feature worth highlighting is SQL for App Engine:

SQL database support on App Engine gives enterprise developers access to the full capabilities of a dedicated relational database, without the headache of managing it.

though Google adds that this is a “premium service” which may come at extra cost. According to the roadmap, this is coming in Q3 2010.

While there is a lot to take in, there is a consistent theme: making the web and browser platform more capable, and making desktop applications and on-premise servers less necessary.

Whereas Apple aims to lock us into its devices and App Store, Google’s approach is more open. It is happy to give away stuff like the WebM multimedia project and the Font API in order to improve the Web overall; though of course every time we use the Font API Google can record the traffic on our site and mine that data if it chooses to do so. It is in line with the strategy unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in February: a little bit of everything you do. Google will take its cut of any Web Store sales. What is Web and what is Google is deliberately blurred.

I still think that the forthcoming Chrome OS is an amazing experiment, and the new offline application support announced yesterday makes sense as an alternative to traditional local applications.

A good day for Adobe and Flash, or a bad one? Adobe’s Kevin Lynch demonstrated new HTML 5 capabilities in Dreamweaver, via an add-on pack. As expected, Adobe is becoming a little less Flash-focused in its PR. Google’s emerging platform is a tool opportunity for Adobe. Still, that is a lesser role than establishing Flash as the universal client, a possibility which Apple seems to have killed. Google is supporting Flash, of course, by building it into Chrome, but at the same time things like WebM, Font API, HTML5, and Native Client (shown as the natural client platform for browser-hosted games) undermine the need for Flash.

Apple is a problem for Google too. Will native client ever work on iPhone or iPad? WebM? The big question – who will marginalise whom?