Google I/O 2014

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.<p>I hate this trend in web design.

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.<p>IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you&#x27;re into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it&#x27;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.<p>If you&#x27;re just going for the technical info, you&#x27;re honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They&#x27;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.

The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn&#x27;t feel it was developer focussed enough. It&#x27;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&#x27;d cynically observe that for many attendees the long term value was actually just the giveaway.<p>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&#x27;ve really learned.<p>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.

In order to be allowed to buy a ticket they should have a simple dynamically-generated programming challenge so non-programmers can&#x27;t search for the exact answer. Maybe some kind of dynamically generated boolean math problem to be implemented with if-else statements.

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

Odd...<p>&quot;This page has been blocked from accessing your microphone.&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t have headphones on, and I see no other indication as to why they&#x27;d want to access my mic. Weird.

Any big announcements rumored for this year&#x27;s I&#x2F;O, e.g. Android 5.0, Nexus 6 phone, 12&quot; tablet, more offline services (Maps, Docs, etc.)?<p>I tried a couple of times to get in, failed, and resigned myself to watching the presentations and tutorials online for free. That&#x27;s fine. Say what you will, Google gives away a lot of knowledge for free and I have benefited greatly.<p>Can&#x27;t wait till June.

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

This page crashes my browser (FF 28 in Ubuntu). Ooops.<p>Anyone else experiencing this?

Typically, they give presale access to repeat attendees (&quot;Ions&quot;) before the general public gets access. As an Ion, there&#x27;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).<p>Wonder if they&#x27;ve scrapped that this year too.

Personally, I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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

I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t quite wrapped my head around which dot represents what value, but it sure does look cool.

Interesting they&#x27;re doing a lottery for registration. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;ll reduce server load though.<p>Also, I love the binary countdown at the bottom of the page.

Did anyone else notice the Doge messages in the console?

I was completely repelled to register on the first line itself in info about registration : <a href="https://www.google.com/events/io/help#!/registration" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;events&#x2F;io&#x2F;help#!&#x2F;registration</a><p>&quot;You will need to sign into Google+ to begin the registration application.&quot; #pushItUpTheirThroatsTillPeopleStartGagging

Make sure to enter the &quot;lottery&quot; 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.

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!

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.

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.

The minigames remind me a lot about Year Walk&#x27;s finale :) <a href="http://youtu.be/tD6ZROIlZhU?t=16m11s" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tD6ZROIlZhU?t=16m11s</a>

In the countdown clock at the bottom, I hate when two decimal digits are displayed with two separate binary digits.<p>39(base 10) does not equal 011,1001<p>39 == 0100111

I&#x27;m guessing Apple will do the same lottery for WWDC this year, that&#x27;s what they did for Tech Talks a few months ago.

How you are you guys, not from US, make it to these kind of events? Isn&#x27;t obtaining visas and so on a problem?

Lottery goes from April 8 - April 10th.

Why do they need microphone access?

Those animations and swags on the website are totally useless and anti-informatic!

anyone know how much $$ required to attend if chosen by lottery system ?

I hope they will finally announce Chrome with built in Dart vm.

Binary clock countdown to registration is pretty cool.

Let&#x27;s hope that they release Glass in June 25.

I wonder if anyone will talk about Android issues covered here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456540" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7456540</a>

I am super impressed and amazed.<p>DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED TO GET THE MOBILE PAGE TO APPEAR WITHOUT A TOOLBAR IN MOBILE SAFARI??? Wow. I have never seen this. I want to be able to do it also.<p>The screen starts off with the browser controls already minimized, even when the page hasn&#x27;t scrolled yet.<p>Also when you scroll down, the bottom toolbar never appears, and it doesn&#x27;t have the typical problem of showing the toolbar when you tap on the bottom part of the screen. How do they pull this off?<p>EDIT: I looked at the page. Is it this? &lt;meta content=&quot;minimal-ui&quot; name=&quot;viewport&quot;&gt;

i dont feel smart enough for this website

How about covering this google: shame on developers for using the api that end users use: <a href="https://twitter.com/duhroach/status/421678850049728512" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;duhroach&#x2F;status&#x2F;421678850049728512</a> We don&#x27;t have choice, as you don&#x27;t nuge updates.<p>Andorid is thew new IE!

OK, I&#x27;ve scrolled all the way down, seen some nice colors and heard some nice music. But where&#x27;s the info about Google I&#x2F;O?<p>Seriously, I didn&#x27;t even try to read the text on the page because its overall mood implies the text is not important at all.<p>This site simply looks like someone&#x27;s homework rather than an info site for a conference.