Back on the subject of Google, there were simply too many amazing sessions to attend. It is impossible to attend all of the awesome sessions because many of them are at the same time. Once I get back home I will continue to enjoy Google I/O all week as I watch the talks that I did not see in person. Realizing that I only saw a small subset of the conference, here are the big themes that I saw and some thoughts on each of them.
The future is made of Glass
The announcements around Project Glass were absolutely amazing. This is the future and Google is going to bring it to developers, including me, next year! I am crazy excited to be on the list of developers who will have early access to Project Glass Explorer Edition. The keynotes will go down as a demo for the history books. This one is going to be hard for anyone to top.
Infrastructure for the big guys
The announcement of Google Compute Engine is significant, but it does not fit the use cases that I currently have for EC2. Their example was focused on the scientific use case of crunching numbers. The price is also competitive, but they do not offer an affordable low end like Amazon, so it is out of my price range.
There were lots of improvements and updates to App Engine, but many of them were not production ready yet. I am happy to see that this platform is moving forward as a core Google technology. I will also be keeping a close eye on the pricing of their SQL product over time to see if it is suitable for some of my projects.
Improvements to the Web
Chrome is definitely big. Huge actually. Technologies like SPDY and the other platform improvements are pushing the web forward at an amazing pase. It seems like Google is the largest player at reshaping what the future of the internet and the web will be and developers are loving it. The announcement of Chrome for iOS is huge and I predict that it will overtake the usage of Chrome on Android very soon.
Design is everything for Android
This last point is probably the most important. It seems that the designers have found a place at Google and the engineers are going to have to make some more room. In the end it is a good thing for users and it seems that the engineers and developers are eager to learn. I know personally I am horrible at making things look good and tend to struggle to make easy to use interfaces. The third day was dedicated to design on the Android platform and the sessions I attended were extremely helpful. I will use what I learned to improve the applications I create. With Jelly Bean released and my new Android devices, I will be spending some time fixing and improving my apps in the coming weeks.
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