Google I/O is here yet again with lots of shiny new things. Including Chromebook Pixel devices for all attendees. I'll be curious to see it in person, as a coworker is in attendance.

First off, I want to keep this thread positive. The comments at the end of the keynote from Page about negativity came at an interesting time for me today too, and it has me in a mood to really reject snide/negative snipes. I'm doing my best to reduce my own habit of these. And I hope Google does improve too. Page's words were good, but the actions of the company reflect a different vision then what he spoke of.

Anyhow, of interest to me out of today:

Google Play is gaining the ability for developers to publish alpha and beta builds through the service. The release engineer in me sees this as a great thing, as it treats the release process with the same steps as needed for shipping a product. I'll be watching the specific session tomorrow for more.

Google APIs are being moved more out of the Android OS later, and more as components updated via Google Play. It's kinda sad to see this being necessary, but clearly their past attempts to get OS updates out quickly to all Android users have failed. I hope they continue to try and improve that situation, but at least updating APIs will help developers greatly.

Two new interesting APIs to show up are location and gaming. Location on Android may in theory work more like iOS, where programmers don't have to deal with switching between location providers (GPS, WiFi, etc), and the OS can more centralize location needs to improve battery life. Also coming in is Geofencing. I'm glad Google is copying what they see is good from iOS and other platforms, as it brings benefits to the users. Gaming wise, centralized matchmaking, achievements and such are coming. Very similar to what XBox Live and Steam popularized and have since been copied by iOS, Sony and others.

Google Play Books will now accept epub and pdf files from peoples personal collections. This addresses one of my bigger surprises from last year with the Nexus 7 trial. May dig it out and try reading again.

Google will be selling a Nexus like version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 soon, though I question the commitment to solid updates after what happened with the Nexus S. Hopefully it being on AT&T and T-Mobile, and away from Verizon is a sign it will be better.

VP9. Not really happy to see this one, as it shows Google is interested in continuing to split the industry on video standards. I understand the open argument, but it still seems this is too late with H.265/HVEC having been finalized in January. Google wants better video standards to lower their bandwidth bill for YouTube. Doing it at the cost of users battery life due to lack of hardware acceleration seems bad. H.265 decoder chips are already likely in development, set to become replacements for where H.264 thrives today. What manufacturer is going to want to toss in 2 decoders, one for H.265 and one for VP9? I guess we will see how it plays out, but VP8 didn't really make an impact like many had hoped. The same strategy for VP9 doesn't seem likely to succeed.

One of the more interesting announcements to me is Google Music All Access, which appears to be Google's answer to Spotify and Pandora. So far it looks pretty nice. Being able to tweak/reorder/delete items from the radio playlist is great, and the unified interface for both collection-based listening and radio-style listening is a big deal for me. I'll probably cancel my Pandora subscription when it comes up for renewal -- even though Pandora's cheaper, you just can't beat seamlessly switching between listening to your library and listening radio style.

On the new Nexus / Galaxy S4 thing -- I guess that means no spec bump for the Nexus 4? I think I'd rather spend $349 for the 4 than $649 for the S4.

This is going to make devs thrilled. At the moment, a few of the apps I use have beta versions, but they have to be listed as separate apps in the App Market.


Sadly, I don't think there's much they can do! They've tried, but it's hard to fight the Galaxy line, and these manufacturers continue to be so arrogant as to think that it's their software that makes people choose their phones. I've NEVER seen a good manufacturer skin. Hell, I've never even seen one that didn't make me want to throw the phone on the floor. I don't know how Google can fight this tide, but at least they can work to get those phones more updated.

(sorry to go negative, but I don't think there are many people on the "I love TouchWiz/SenseUI" side of the fight)


There is no conceivable way that I could be less interested in achievements, leaderboards, and matchmaking. Those things hold absolutely zero interest for me. However, what makes me super excited about Play Game Services is save state sharing. This is something I've always been shocked that I didn't see from the developers themselves. The #1 thing that makes me hate wiping my phone is that I'll lose all progress I made in my games, so the faster devs get this into their apps the better.


Were the problems with actual Google-sold Nexus S's? Or were they with models sold by the manufacturer? Sorry, I never really followed that model much. I don't have much doubt that Google will update this phone. They've always done so (as far as I can remember) for phones sold in their online store. The whole "no Verizon" thing should help like you said, though.


I thought peering arrangements meant they basically don't pay for Youtube...


Even though I've been an rdio user for over a year, I signed up for All Access. The primary appeal for me is what you were saying, Tony, that I could now have my subscription music mixed in with my personal collection. It's the best of both worlds. I can create my own playlist, and mix songs from my subscription library with the Beatles and Zeppelin. So far, when I've been driving around I've been extremely displeased with the streaming connection, but they just released this specific service and they might be a little overloaded right now. All I know is that I had to restart my playlist several times on my 50 minute round trip car ride. This never happens to me on rdio.


I thought Larry Page's comments at the end of the show were fantastic. Very hopeful, and frankly you don't have to agree with what the company is doing to agree he's at least saying all the right things. I liked his urging to promote technology with the younger generations (although I highly doubt that The Internship is the way to do it - that movie looks terrible).

As for other news from the keynote, the biggest thing I got excited for was easy: SYNCED NOTIFICATIONS!!! Dear lord, how excited am I for that!? It's weirdly annoying to go to my tablet at night and see all the calendar notifications that I'd been addressing on my phone all day.

I was also very intrigued by the desktop voice search. I'll admit, it's a little weird that my browser is going to listen to everything that I say, listening for me to speak the magic words to it, but I do like the technology

I liked the Google+ signon stuff. The demo they did where you sign up for a sight with your Google account, install the app, and the app automatically installs and already has you signed in on your mobile device - that was neat.

I'll think of other things to talk about, but it was a super long keynote and it's getting late. Overall, I liked the things they announced, and I'd have to imagine that developers liked the show.

One more thing (man, they announced a lot today): Google+

The new layout looks great, and the stuff they're able to interpret about your images is insane. I've created a couple albums and the way it's able to algorithmically detect good aesthetics is actually surprising in how good it does. I was pretty shocked...

I haven't played around with the auto enhance much, but it didn't really do much to the photos I tried it on. I also don't have any photos to try the "auto-awesome" stuff on, but I'll probably create some artificial tests to check that stuff out later.

All Access is indeed a great thing. In many ways, it's a reinvention of Rhapsody (pay a flat fee, get everything). I've been playing with it, and I've been impressed so far. Just for fun, I punched in "Slim and Slam" to see if it could find Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart (a jazz duo who were very funny, perhaps the They Might Be Giants of their day). I brought up one album and hit the "Radio" button. *Foomp!* Instant playlist! Some of the artists they picked fit quite well (e.g., Jimmy Lunceford -- straight up big band jazz) and others leave me scratching my head (e.g., Dizzy Gillespie's "La Africana" which is about as far away from Slim and Slam as can be). There doesn't appear to be any sort of "thumbs up/down" training mechanism, which you'd really want for building custom radio stations.

In the web interface, I have thumbs up/thumbs down for songs in the radio playlist. Haven't spent any time with the Android app yet -- perhaps it's a web-only thing for now?

One concern I'm trying to confirm, the new "Google Hangouts" (not to be confused with Google Hangouts from 2012) seems to be rolling up Google Talk, and Google+ Messenger. And Hangouts is not XMPP (Jabber) based.

I use two IM networks still, AIM and XMPP access to Google Talk/Google+ Messenger. I dropped MSN a while back, and it's now dead anyhow integrated into Skype. If XMPP is really going away at Google, Trillian/Adium/iChat and other multi protocol programs become less useful now. Not sure what I'm going to do there going forward.

Really? I'm missing something. I can do 1-5 stars on a track in the radio playlist queue. It's unclear how those stars influence things. Do they influence the computation of the radio stations or are they just global metadata on what you like and dislike?

Amusement: I asked Google to build me a radio channel around Brassft Punk's cover of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (SoundCloud link). The resulting song queue has a little bit of everything: Tito Puente, Men Without Hats, and even Cameo.

This feature is going to need some work...

I'm personally fine with the custom skins being options out there, the underlying problem of the OS not seeing updates is the issue for me. API updates are good for the development community, but lack of OS updates means security holes can still persist for ages. Microsoft seems to handle the multiple devices update issue better then Google with Windows Phone. I was hoping Google would try and move in that direction going forward, but it doesn't appear so. Facebook Home provided an good glimpse into the ability to reskin the phone without having to have the deep OS hooks. The pieces are there to act on.


Oops, I meant Galaxy Nexus. Keeping track of Android phone names is a PITA, especially when some don't even bother to put their name on it. I still forget the name of my work assigned android phone frequently.


I'm just going off what they claimed in the keynote. And from experience, peering agreements can and frequently do change daily. Routing internet traffic is big business these days, complete with all the greed that can and frequently does make routes worse for a while as "punishment".

You've probably opted into their five-star ratings thing under the "Music Labs" menu. That seems to replace the thumbs-up/thumbs-down. Based on that, it's unclear to me that either of these widgets is actually connected to anything in terms of radio station training/programming.

Hmm. After Google I/O is over, I'll poke around my Google buddies and see if I can learn any more.

They definitely have work to do here. Here's an example:

- I search for the song "Truth" by Alexander
- Sure enough, the first song that comes up in the results was the one I was looking for
- However, the other songs it brought up were NOT, like "The Climb" by Miley Cyrus and a few other similar songs
- I clicked the "thumbs down" button next to those songs, yet when "Truth" ended, sure enough I was subjected to "The Climb"
- The problem is that you have to actually start listening to a song you don't want to hear, then clicking the thumbs down button will instantly move to the next track

This is different in the Android App. You can swipe away future tracks in a playlist easily, and it's a great design. They just need to add that to the web app somehow.


Man, I can't wait to get the desktop voice search and the web Maps invites...

Have any Google Music users tried out any third party desktop clients? I played around with this API for awhile back when I had dreams of Google Music empeg integration, but getting Python to run smoothly on the empeg's limited hardware resources just isn't in the cards. (Perhaps now that I'm putting a Raspberry Pi in my car that could change.) I've also seen a couple of things in the Mac app store (one was called "G Ear", I forget the name of the other one) that purport to do the things you'd want a Google Music desktop app to do -- global hotkeys, new song notifications, etc. But I'm insanely picky about my music player apps, so I'm hesitant to plunk down the cash for an app that I can't easily get a refund for.

I don't see any evidence that the radio stations have per-user training at all. It keeps picking songs I've thumbed down, and the station mixes seem pretty static no matter what I've listened to / skipped. Seems like they wanted to get something that "works" out and will do the learning stuff later.

I'd also like to discuss the things people expected to see at IO but didn't. Hardware is the easy one. Basically, there wasn't any. We already knew about the Pixel, and the S4 is old news.

We also didn't see anything about Google TV. Well, there was an announcement later that day that it would be getting updated, but that's almost non-news (I have a Google TV, but I'd be amazed if it actually got updated). Google TV was apparently relegated to a booth in the back of some hall, out of the way.

I'll be the first to admit that the Google TV is a failed product. I tend to like it, but there's really not much to it, and I would never recommend it to most people over a Roku or Apple TV. I'll be interested if they announce anything about it at all anytime soon.

The other big thing that we haven't heard anything about is Android@Home. Where the hell did that go? I've been hoping for a while now that someone would knock the home automation industry on its ass, because it sorely needs it. Everything out there right now is terribly expensive and user-unfriendly. Perhaps now that Andy Rubin is over at the x labs, he'll start working on that stuff. I know he's really into it, although he's more into robotics so that might be what he's actually doing.

Anyway, what other omissions were you surprised by?

Ditto on Google TV. It appears that Microsoft's new Xbox is trying to get into the same space (i.e., providing Internet goodness around your TV watching experience and doing everything except DVR, which is the thing that you'd really want).

I still keep my Google TV / Bluray player running, and it's still useful as a front-end to Google Music and to my photos on Picasaweb. Basically, the current GTV is a nice thing to have if you've bought fully into the Google ecosystem. Otherwise, it's not very exciting.

Agreed.

It's funny how the XBox One is also doing the whole "middleman" thing with the HDMI in/out. That's actually my favorite part of Google TV, that I can just start typing on the remote and I start searching Google. It really is faster than switching inputs first, and all happens over what I'm watching.

I haven't tried the new All Access stuff on Google TV. Is it any good?

All Access does work. Curiously, while I see 1-5 stars on the web interface, it's thumbs up/down on the TV interface. Otherwise, it's basically the same feature set, just shoehorned into the TV interface.

I'm still puzzled about where you see the five star rating. I definitely don't have that on the web. Does your interface look like the screenshot here?

Here's a screenshot:


See the bottom right. I double checked, and this is a feature I enabled in the "labs" option panel.

Guess you didn't see where I pointed you to that up-thread.

Interesting. And you're right, it's hard to tell if it actually does anything...