Google IO 2009 was held in sunny San Francisco and Novoda’s presence acted as a technical bridge for the Royal Veterinary College, London Knowledge Lab and the wider Bloomsbury Colleges as they further explored Google’s Android platform as a potential tool for the collection of medical & veterinary data. As I was acting on behalf of Academia the trip was very kindly funded by JISC, so a big thank you to them.

Google event’s are renowned for merging developers’ unique personalities with the approachable yet cutting edge image of Google technology. There were brightly coloured bean bags, qr-code scavenger hunts, make shift Google street view holo-chambers, arcade cabinets and robot wars but they were all in aid of furthering the interaction of developers and getting them conversing on areas of tech. As if the fact that all the attendees received free G2 HTC magic phones was not reason enough for conversation.

Talks

The talks were generally of a very high standard with a whole section dedicated to each Google interest  including mobile (Android). Outside of each speaking area was an alcove where Google advocates were freely available for questioning on the intricacies of each specific technology. Each recorded session lasts about an hour so specifically, I recommend watching the following:

Writing Real-Time Games for Android w/ Chris Pruett is well delivered with captivating game development content. Chris considers the resource usage on Android from the perspective of a developer used to a similarly constrained C++ mobile environment.

Android media framework w/ David Sparks contains good graphical representations of media call life cycles from the native system upwards and addresses the techniques while dealing with all forms of media.

Coding for Life — battery life, that is w/ Jeffrey Sharkey offers a primer on how to be mindful of your applications specific actions how they are affecting a device’s power consumption.

Supporting Multiple Devices with One Binary w/ Joe Onorato & Romain guy addresses the problem of standarising the presentation of a UI of multiple ‘densities’ on different devices.

Although not based on Android, another talk which is well worth mentioning was the second day’s big topic of conversation ‘Google wave’ which it has to be said is an exciting convergence in persisted communications.

Attendees & Exhibitors

It was difficult choosing to not attend talks and venturing away from the Android alcove but there were some worthwhile exhibitors.

EA consistently sets a high technical standard on all platforms and the same can be said about their android offerings, Sim city, The Sims, Tetris and Monopoly. Close by them was the extremely nice Spotify (premium content) app which sports intuitive & innovative UI design. Each of the bottom tabs can be slid upwards to reveal a more detailed selection of options within that tab’s context which is a nice touch on an already very usable app.

Mobile media company 1Cast were showing off thier app’s streaming capabilities and the fact that it can search through a huge catalogue of their partners premium content. The very snappy responsiveness signals a mobile media viewing experience which is slowly entering the big leagues.

Swedish Game development company Illusion Labs had their games on show including my personal fave ‘Labyrinth’. Labyrinth works the same as the traditional wooden games but the real charm of this particular port is that it provides such pleasant tactile feedback whenever your metal ball hits against the sides of the wooden box. The subtle feedback makes this an exemplar experience for tactile interaction within mobile games.

Catalista also had a very nice location aware application which allows user to find nearby volunteering opportunities.

Some guys from Tubaloo demonstrated a personalised VoIP build of android which they are planning to soon offer the Latin American market. The threat of VoIP to traditional phone services has been looming on the horizon and we’ve recently seen some movement from Skype onto cellphones but could this signal the start of competition in this market?

Also worth a notable mention even though they weren’t technically exhibiting was the Czech Republic based company Inmite who impressed me with both their development knowledge and their popular ‘Lokola’ application which finds searches through the online portal’s directory of resources relative to the device’s global positioning.

Post Google IO

Eager to network with universities, I was surprised to speak with very few groups doing exploratory research on Google Android especially since I encountered such wide acknowledgment of it’s potential in this area. There were the notable exception of San Francisco State University who are just beginning to look into the possibilities of mobile applications within their current work in blood & disease analysis. Hopefully we can soon establish some talks between them and RVC to exchange experiences. If you yourself know of universities working on with the Android platform then please do contact us!

I was lucky enough to spend some time with the developers from the well intentioned ODK project who are developing free tools to aid the collection of standard data by providing an easy click through forms interface. They wished to emphasize their eagerness to receive participation and feedback which I hopefully helped them with by suggesting some commercial and academic use cases.

Some of  the world’s largest media networks for games, music and television were at Google IO to show off their polished offerings to a standard which has until recently has been reserved for the IPhone. This is encouraging because as industry draws attention to the platform, media companies will invest in the relevant training and as a by product we should hopefully see an explosion of free and organisational offerings. ADC2 itself would usually have had entrepreneurial developers inquiring into Google’s offered cash prize but team this with the fact they have given free devices to their most loyal developer audience ensures that there will soon be fresh activity hitting the Android market.

Android SDK at time of writing was: 1.5_r2

Citations & Research

• Google IO logo sourced from cvander’s Flickr account