Many of the sessions today at I/O were a deep dive into themes introduced yesterday. I tried to spread out across mobile, cloud, and web tooling. There is a lot of new announcements and improvements, too much to all cram into a blog post. What I find exciting is that almost everything is available now, either as production or a preview-turning-into-production-soon.
A recurring theme across the conference is that the (web) apps of today are not going to cut it tomorrow. Janky web sites? Be prepared to profile and optimize for smooth scrolling and animation. An Android app that just works? Everyone can do that, it should be magical. I really liked some new ideas on building Android apps. For instance, animation based on rules created for Walt Disney cartoons, made for some interesting and useful UX concepts.
The new chrome dev tools now does interop with local files, making it easy to use powerful live editing combined with existing editors and IDEs like Eclipse. The new Sass support is really useful, and profiling and debugging got even better, especially on mobile devices. Effective use of these tools will undoubtedly yield some pretty massive productivity gains.
I liked a concept presented by the AppEngine team for a NoBackend style solution for Android development. They built a complete app, fully authenticated, packaged with advanced REST API security and live syncing, in about half an hour. The Dart team also announced many new features, some impressive benchmarks, and Adobe will support an export to Dart in its upcoming Flash Pro content editor.
Google provides exciting new APIs and tools, not just for applications we build today, but especially for reaching the next level of App nirvana. Google admits that they don’t always know what people will come up with, based on these new features. For many of the new things, the right way of using a feature is not really known yet. That means huge new opportunities, but also experimentation to get it right. Reto Meijer, a long time Android best practices presenter, expressed this really well: don’t prepare for the future, build the future!