Google I/O 2014

[Goosey]

After making it all the way to the exoplanets and back to the higgs I nearly gave up before finally realizing I could scroll down.

I hate this trend in web design.

[atonse]

Oh geez. I didn't even know you could scroll down. I played around for a bit, thought "ok what's the point of this?" and just moved on.

[untog]

I blame the trend in UI design to hide scroll bars. On desktop they're perfectly visible and it's not so difficult to work out that you need to scroll.

[cwilson]

The first slide is to blame, not the overall design. I scrolled from the get-go, but that's because I didn't engage with the "play" button on the first slide which seems like the only thing they want you to do. If there were no way to interact with something in that first slide, you'd scroll.

[piyush_soni]

What the ... I didn't realize that till I read this post of yours even after playing all those clicking games. I thought since it's far away, may be they only have these animations here and someone shared it only because of them.

[lloeki]

In all honesty I did scroll but didn't realise it was interactive until reading your comment, bewildered reading about Higgs and planets

[stronglikedan]

I hate that I have to scroll at all to read a couple hundred words at most, let alone scroll five freakin' times on a 1080 display.

Edit: And why in the world am I getting the webcam indicator on this site‽

[angrydev]

No idea you could scroll down either, I just closed the tab and moved on.

[negrit]

I'm glad I checked the comments here... This design doesn't make sense.

[laureny]

Also, the page wants to use my microphone, did anyone try to speak to it?

[amaks]

If you were attentive, you could notice "continue to site" arrow on the very first screen.

[camilo_u]

Actually I just realized I could scroll with your comment!

[Detrus]

It used to be much worse with flashy microsites. You'd open them and wait minutes for the first page to load. Then click somewhere and wait again. And the UIs would be much more confusing. Scrollwheel would be disabled.

This flash throwback at the top with a scroll to the rest of the site that loads instantly is a big step forward.

[rumdz]

Wow, I just did the same thing. I actually wouldn't have scrolled down if it wasn't for your comment.

[stewdio]

That’s a shame because selfishly I want everyone to see the second slide which is of the Racer game we unveiled at last year’s I/O. Was a proud moment for us code-play folk ;) http://www.chrome.com/racer

[helpful]

It seems a lot of responses here were they didn't know they could scroll. I'm in the opposite camp. Didn't notice there was a play option and just scrolled :/

[pervycreeper]

Slightly OT, but how could you tell it was a higgs? What was the icosahedron representing?

[tyagis]

I am starting to see a pattern of subtle hints about the demos this year.

[corresation]

When Google originally started doing this it was essentially to open people's eyes to the capabilities of HTML. Lately, however, it has just been excessive. In this case it isn't even particularly clever: Click on stuff and stuff happens. If you had to actually align planets or build real molecules / atoms, then cool, but just clicking on highlighted things is not interesting.

[tikl1]

I just rage quited because of this loop...

[habosa]

Last summer I interned on Google+ Developer Relations so I got to go to IO for free and as staff, which is pretty rare even among Googlers.

IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.

If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.

[fidotron]

The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough. It'll be interesting to see if there is a giveaway at all this year, since a large part of previous woes could be down to people attending just for that, and I'd cynically observe that for many attendees the long term value was actually just the giveaway.

The lottery is a definite step in the right direction, but the branding is just all kinds of terrible, and makes me wonder how much they've really learned.

If they can improve access to the same content and people at remote locations that might be a game changer (i.e. hangouts to allow remote participation in some of their sideshows), as most of the value of attending the main event is what goes on outside the main talks, thanks to YouTube being so effective for hosting those.

[guelo]

In order to be allowed to buy a ticket they should have a simple dynamically-generated programming challenge so non-programmers can't search for the exact answer. Maybe some kind of dynamically generated boolean math problem to be implemented with if-else statements.

[dsl]

You should have to write a working Juniper configuration to establish a peering session at an exchange with YouTube.

Then non-network engineers wouldn't be grabbing up all the tickets.

[mbreese]

A regex should just about cover it.

[roryokane]

They could just integrate http://codecha.org/. "Codecha: Prove you're human through your code."

[rplnt]

Google IO is not only for programmers though.

[pjmlp]

Even without attending it, I am looking forward to see if there are presentations about ART and improving the state of Java on Android.

Now with Java 8 out, it is pretty lame that one still needs to use a Java 6 fork to target the majority of Android devices.

[yincrash]

SDK Tools, Revision 22.6 (March 2014) added support for Java 7 language features. You use Java 7 to build.

"features like multi-catch, try-with-resources, and the diamond operator. " - [1]

[1] - http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/tools-notes.html

[benjamincburns]

Odd...

"This page has been blocked from accessing your microphone."

I don't have headphones on, and I see no other indication as to why they'd want to access my mic. Weird.

[prawks]

At the bottom right-hand corner of the page when it loads it tells me:

"Explore technology and its impact from small to large through tapping, spinning and making sound.

It seems that making noise causes the animation to do things.

[blisterpeanuts]

Any big announcements rumored for this year's I/O, e.g. Android 5.0, Nexus 6 phone, 12" tablet, more offline services (Maps, Docs, etc.)?

I tried a couple of times to get in, failed, and resigned myself to watching the presentations and tutorials online for free. That's fine. Say what you will, Google gives away a lot of knowledge for free and I have benefited greatly.

Can't wait till June.

[nawitus]

Hmm, that website is extremely slow for me (on Firefox).

[room271]

This page crashes my browser (FF 28 in Ubuntu). Ooops.

Anyone else experiencing this?

[bsimpson]

Typically, they give presale access to repeat attendees ("Ions") before the general public gets access. As an Ion, there's incentive to go every year if only to maintain your ability to go next year (nevermind interacting with the Googlers who build the APIs you rely or the hardware seeding, clearly also benefits).

Wonder if they've scrapped that this year too.

[eitally]

That was only for people who have attended every I/O.

[mfkp]

Personally, I'm glad they switched to the lottery. I had the worst experience last year. Got a ticket after refreshing the page for a half hour, but then Google Wallet was broken so it wouldn't let me pay for it (cart expires in 5 minutes). Hopefully they can handle the server load spread out over 2 days this time.

[tgeery]

The console logging going on is pretty dang funny...

[brianwillis]

I'm fascinated by the dotted countdown clock at the bottom of the page. It took me a while to figure out exactly what it was, and I got lost in Wikipedia reading about how braille is represented in unicode, thinking it had something to do with that.

My guess is that the first set in dark blue is days remaining, followed by hours in purple, minutes in green, and seconds in light blue. Haven't quite wrapped my head around which dot represents what value, but it sure does look cool.

[anvarik]

days do not have an upper bound; therefore you see 8bits on the most left position. Hours can be at most 24, so 7th bit is not present, minutes&seconds can be at most 60 so 8th bit is not present etc...

[Aaronneyer]

It's just simple binary, representing the days, hours, minutes, seconds

[pbnjay]

Interesting they're doing a lottery for registration. I'm sure it'll reduce server load though.

Also, I love the binary countdown at the bottom of the page.

[jack_hanford]

Did anyone else notice the Doge messages in the console?

[mnadkvlb]

I was completely repelled to register on the first line itself in info about registration : https://www.google.com/events/io/help#!/registration

"You will need to sign into Google+ to begin the registration application." #pushItUpTheirThroatsTillPeopleStartGagging

[lnanek2]

Make sure to enter the "lottery" with a company or app publishing account email if possible. Just polling people in the industry last time, people with emails from popular press and media often had no trouble at all. A possible reason is a whitelist for certain email domains.

[jdmitch]

The thing I first paid attention to was that there is no longer a mad dash to sign up in the first 10 seconds, but they pick people at random from those who apply in the first 2 days. I might actually make it for once!

[rdl]

I predict we will now see greater adoption on google wallet, since having a bunch of google wallets with virtual credit card numbers effectively gives you more tickets to the lottery. Sneaky plot by google there.

[whizzkid]

You could see that you can scroll down to page from the beginning but i somehow expected the animation to take me to those information below step by step. But instead animation started from the beginning again.