Charles Engelke's Blog

…is going better for me than yesterday.  Sessions are mostly running a bit short, so it’s not nearly as frantic running from room to room.  I even had time to eat a sandwich, and as a result had a nice chat with another attendee.  It turned out she grew up in Gainesville, where I lived and still work.  And she’s working on technology very relevant to what our applications need, and is going to send me some information on new functionality as soon as it’s announced.

That kind of ad hoc meeting is something I like about conferences, and Google IO’s ultra-tight schedule with no break for lunch gets in the way.  I hope they change it next year.

Today started with a talk by Marissa Mayer, Google VP of Search and User Experience.  It was again very well done, and she’s an engaging speaker.

We heard some interesting things about how Google designs their pages.  For instance, they added the copyright notice at the bottom of the page not for legal reasons, but because in early user tests people kept waiting after the page was displayed before they’d enter a query.  Why?  They were waiting for the “rest of it”; the page couldn’t be loaded, it was too sparse.  So the copyright notice was added “as punctuation” to signal folks that the page was loaded and ready.

They do a lot of A/B (or A/B/C…) testing, where different users get slightly different pages from Google, and Google gathers and analyzes data about user behavior as a result.  They often find that very tiny changes changes can have a big effect.  The amount of white space between the Google logo and the separator bar on a results page?  The small amount they use results in greater user satisfaction and more Google searches than larger gaps.  Text ads with yellow backgrounds instead of blue?  Measurably better results.

What I took away from this was that you should listen to, or observe, what your users do, not what they say.  Mayer referenced a Henry Ford quote I hadn’t heard before:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

This evening Google had a reception with lots of food and drink, and music by Flight of the Conchords.

Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of Ajaxian told us about Ajax tools and frameworks, and the direction they see Ajax going.  Their talk was really well done, and very interesting.  Google taped all the talks and said they will post them sometime, probably on code.google.com, so you’ll be able to see for yourselves.

Highlights I took down:

There are lots of Ajax frameworks and toolkits, which were created to do different kinds of things. But over time, the leaders all evolved to cover similar broad spectra of functionality. The four families that really matter now are Prototype, Dojo, jQuery, and GWT. (I wonder if including GWT is partly just an acknowledgment of the conference sponsor.)

Future directions are to make the browser as capable as your PC, and will eventually be strong competition for native GUI applications. Tools for that include Fluid (which I hadn’t heard of), Adobe Air, Mozilla Prism, and Google Gears.

Google’s logo for Google IO is the binary values of ASCII IO, with white circles for 1 and black circles for 0. Their slides do the same thing, but with large and small circles:

The t-shirts they’ve given us use the same coding to spell out Google IO. Except they spell Google KO instead:

Their own t-shirts say the same thing, but in black on white instead of white on black.

A mistake? Or a threat to potential competitors?

This morning’s keynote for Google IO was the just about the best talk of that kind I’ve ever attended.  It was a broad overview of the topics from Vic Gundotra, a Google Vice President of Engineering, with several short talks on specific topics by relevant staff members.  It was full of useful information and whetted my appetite for the upcoming breakout sessions, and the speakers were all very polished and clearly rehearsed.

Some highlighted topics:

• Google Javascript APIs.  Google has really opened its services up, and provides easy to use RESTful libraries for getting them to them in Javascript.  I’m not real interested right now in any single one of them, but the breadth of what’s available now is impressive.
• Android.  Some very nice demos of mobile phones running Android, but I’m not clear on when this technology will actually be available for people like me to use.  I want it, but I bet today’s cellular provides, who always want to lock their users down, probably don’t want it.
• AppEngine.  This is the technology that triggered my decision to attend the conference.  I’ve done some development in it, like it, and see great uses for it.  The big news for AppEngine is that it is now (as of today) open for anyone to sign up to use.  They also showed some approximate pricing for when it becomes a fully supported product, but committed to making it always free for low volume users.  “Low volume” will be defined in terms of storage, CPU, data transfers, and so on, but the free level will be enough to cover an average of 5 million page views per month.
• OpenSocial.  Google’s supporting open APIs for social networking in a big way.  Personally, I’m not currently very interested in it.
• Google Web Toolkit.  In addition to the native Javascript APIs, Google supports client-side development with GWT.  You write the applications in Java, and GWT compiles it to Javascript for deployment to the browser.  I don’t get it.  The speaker made a big deal of how Java was a much better language for this, and had grown-up development tools, but didn’t convince me.  I remember vendors pushing Cobol for developing in OS/2 and Windows for the same kinds of reasons.  Have you seen a lot of Cobol GUI programs?
• Google Gears.  Now just called Gears.  This is a browser plug-in that lets you do all sorts of great things with Ajax, like store persistent data on the client and access client resources.  They are looking at this as a bleeding edge early preview of HTML 5, and I think it’s going to be important.

That’s not exhaustive, but it’s fairly complete.  I’m glad I came.

That is, the Google IO conference starting today in San Francisco isn’t scaling very well.  Registration was very, very slow for some reason, even though all that seemed to be happening was finding preprinted badges and giving them to attendees.  They simply couldn’t get people registered in the 90 minutes from when they opened at 8:00 until the keynote at 9:30, so they decided to let people attend sessions most of today without badges.  People need to go to the desks between sessions and get their badges by the end of the day.

Agenda scheduling doesn’t seem very practical.  Sessions go on non-stop all day with 15 minute gaps between them.  People are supposed to grab food during those breaks, but the food’s on a separate floor, and with such large crowds I don’t think you can even get to the other floor and back in that time.  The other choice would be to skip a session to eat, but the agenda is very strong.  I’m glad I ate a big breakfast.

The conference content has been great so far, with the most polished yet technical talks I’ve ever seen.  I hope that keeps up for the whole time.  Notes on sessions later as I get some breaks.  I’m not going to write during the sessions themselves.