Robot Media just moved to a new shiny office in Barcelona’s Eixample and we had a welcome party to celebrate with friends. While discussing the party “features”, we had this crazy idea where we would assemble a video out of many other videos with robotic stuff.

I immediately thought that was a job for ffmpeg, as cutting the videos manually would be super tiring and we didn’t have much time for that.

So I assembled a quick script that read a text file with a list of collectively sourced YouTube URLs, then used youtube-dl for downloading the videos, and finally called ffmpeg to extract three second slices from the videos, resized and padded them as required (to create a Full HD version), and finally appended all of them together using the amazing MP4Box.

After that, I placed the half gigabyte file in the very capable hands of mr. Eyeclipse, who added the Robot Media watermark and a tint of “corporate blue” with After Effects. Maybe that could have been done with ffmpeg too, but getting the right tint hue wouldn’t have been as interactive (and immediate) as with AE.

We then placed the video on loop in the office TV. Party guests were challenged to identify and tweet the name of ten robots appearing in the video. Only one person managed to do that, and he got a full set of robot stickers!

The script is slightly messy so I haven’t got round to publishing it yet. I’ll do that soon, so that you can create your own crazy randomized mash-ups with just a couple of YouTube URLs.

Few days after the party I remembered the supersupercut project that was unveiled at past seven on seven project on New York. Back then, they mentioned they had used already “cut” scenes in the project they showed, so the scene detection process was manual.

This time when I checked the supersupercut website, it turned out they are now using something called Shotdetect, an open source piece of software that can detect scenes in videos! Damn! I should have checked it before! That way I would have been able to select slices from different scenes, as sometimes there are several clips from the same scene and it looks like it’s the same clip.

Though it would be even more interesting if it could detect things such as faces or objects appearing in the scene and then filter scenes according to that (e.g. return scenes that contain robots). Surely there’s some sort of academic thesis on this waiting to be implemented by Adobe on the next CS iteration!

In any case: food (or software) for thought. It goes to the list of “things to revisit” at some point; hopefully it will get into my “bag of tricks” too, just as MP4Box and ffmpeg did :-)

By the way, it was a pleasure to find out that both ffmpeg and MP4Box are available in ArchLinux’s repositories, and they are very recent versions too. Excellent! No more compiling from SVN just to get things such as WebM supported! Beat that, Ubuntu :-P

And while most of the attendees brought their laptops, I went oldschool and brought a trusty notepad and a ballpen to jot down whatever caught my attention.

First in the morning was the HTML session. I didn’t write anything down about this one, since I was concentrated on looking at the stuff Paul Kinlan was showing. I knew about most of the stuff he talked about, but it was a nice reminder. It was cool that the slides were interactive themselves, so he could demonstrate things without getting out of the “slides environment”. Then went Mr.doob and his short GLSL + WebGL talk. I think it was too short for the topic! Anyway, people were quite impressed with the patterns one could generate by writing a shader, and since he’s released an improved version of the interactive GLSL sandbox tool he used, you can now experiment in the same way he did! :-)

Then came the break time and I got talking and after that I sadly missed much of the talk about Google+ from Ade Oshineye, confiding that I would be able to catch up later on by looking at the docs :-P

I entered the conference area again for the Android sessions with Bruno Oliveira. I was quite interested in hearing what they had to say, after the recent “events”: 4.0 announced, the Android git repo being taken down, the (in)famous fragmentation chart, etc…

… and what I heard was a bit disappointing. It seems to me there’s a fundamental disconnection between what Android developers want and what Google/Android has to offer. It was very obvious when questions time arrived and most of the attendees were asking questions about monetising the apps (or in other words, being able to recover the investment on the platform), and pretty much all Bruno had to answer was that Android intended to be a democratic platform, focused on what the user wants, and not forcing them to do something like entering credit card information when turning on the device for the first time. He also added that Android wasn’t targeted to any specific income range as other platforms do.

When asked about “fragmentation” he said that:

[...] diversity is a feature of the platform, is not really fragmentation. Different operating system versions [...] is what people call fragmentation [...]
It’s a consequence of being open source [...] we don’t want to put pressure on manufacturers. Maybe in a friendly way, releasing cool inspiring phones like the Nexus S, etc… [...]

He was also asked about the agreement between Android and manufacturers regarding updates that was announced and widely discussed on past Google I/O, but after digressing for a while he didn’t give any definite statement on that matter.

Then he went on to give some advice on how to make great apps, suggesting we should detect the available features on each device and act accordingly, activating or deactivating features in our apps, because not being compatible with a certain phone is being arrogant, like saying to the user that he bought the wrong phone.

This is something that particularly irks me, as sometimes there’s no written specification that app developers can consult and be confident will be followed to the letter, as each phone diverges a lot on its behaviour. It’s impossible to know in advance what will happen unless you test it with the real phone. Yes, there’s the emulator, and that famous esoteric compatibility suite that a phone must passed in order to have the Google apps (Market, Gmail…) installed, but that doesn’t guarantee that a real phone will have a proper, complete GL ES implementation, for example.

So making that type of statements did actually sound wildly arrogant on his side. And he went on, happily adding there wasn’t no excuse for not creating all the different versions of resources for all the different screen sizes and densities. This was followed by a general moaning and mumbling in the public, as with each new release of the SDK not only are there new features that need to be used if you want a “cool app” that uses the latest stuff in new phones, but there are also new resources to be created and maintained, thus increasing the complexity required to build something “great” for Android versions ≤ X.

Something else that really worries/annoys me is the insistence in showing raw activation and installation numbers in every presentation they do. It doesn’t make much sense on the long term: I have probably activated four devices but that doesn’t mean I use all of them (as I use them for testing), or that I am four different potential users. Another use case: people using carrier-subsidised phones change them quite often, but that doesn’t mean a new user is created from void each time a new phone is activated. It’s still the same user and he’s not going to expand the market–it actually stays the same, as the old phone will probably get thrown in a drawer. Same goes for installation numbers: that you install an application doesn’t mean you actually use or keep it on your device. They could show uninstallation numbers too, and the ratio between installs and uninstalls would be a way better indicator (but probably not as attractive).

Moving on, it was lunch time, which we used to discuss the above points. Most people dismissed Bruno’s compatibility strategy as it’s plain unrealistic (unless you have an infinite number of testing resources, or simply build very basic and unexciting apps). Some jokes were made about the fragmentation “feature”: it’s not a defective phone, it’s a feature!.

After lunch we got Paul Kinlan again, explaining several strategies for “making a business out of apps”. Again he relied massively on AdSense, which has proven to be a very unreliable and arbitrary source of income. He also mentioned the Chrome Webstore, of course, but it’s not very widely extended yet. This session wasn’t as enlightening as the HTML session, as the concepts weren’t new and … well, you can imagine the rest.

Next was Danny Hermes with an strange session on the Shopping API. He sounded slightly apologetic and felt like out of place since there wasn’t even a “Shopping” icon on the banner, whereas there were G+, Android and Chrome icons, but at least was really enthusiastic about his topic. I guess this talk could be interesting for people integrating Google’s Product Search with online shops, but this is not something I’m currently interested at so I didn’t pay much attention.

Sam Dutton’s Chrome Dev Tools session was way more interesting. It was funny that we were commenting: it would be cool if you could save the changes you do live… And then he said: here’s this new feature: now you can save the changes you made to the document!.

It also made me slightly envious: the Chrome developer tools are an amazing platform for developing, and the Android toolset pales in comparison. It’s all “hacks” here and there: a separate app for tracing, another one for viewing the layout, an app for debugging… Seems like Google should invest more in the Android team ;-)

It was time for “snacks” again. I had a coffee, thanks to the help of @thespite which showed me how to use a Nespresso machine. Yes, I had never used one before–I’m a slow-food sort of person and generally use a french coffee maker instead ;-)

And finally it was time for more Ade Oshineye talks, this time on the Google+ Hangouts API, but for some reason (saturation?) my brain squarely refused to pay attention. I’m so sorry Ade! See, if the talks had been recorded I might be able to watch them ;-)

After the talk finished, it was “Pitch your app” time, where several attendees tried to convince us that their app was the best ever. The best demonstration got a voucher redeemable for a Nexus S, since the phone is not available for sale yet. I was nicely surprised by the level of English demonstrated by the guys pitching the app. They still have a lot of Spanish accent but they aren’t kicking the grammar like a punch bag every two words, and that’s something you can’t say about most mono-English speakers! So well done on that front!

Regarding the apps, I was a bit less impressed, as most of them weren’t really surprising: weather aggregation services, GPS tracking+Maps, cloud CMS integration, a football game, a chess game, bike rental locations aggregation/visualisation… nothing that got me enthusiastic about :-P

What did surprise me in fact was that one of the pitchers connected his laptop to the projector and I could see how he opened a terminal and wrote “pm-suspend” prior to disconnecting the computer from the projector. Now that is hardcore! Who needs widgets to suspend the computer? A terminal is all you need! \o/

So to sum up, it was quite an event-packed day, quite professionally organised. Thanks and well done, Google! It not only provide me with some new ideas and tricks, but it also got me thinking about the true Google strategy on Android. Unfortunately the post was getting too long, and that discourse seemed slightly out of place, so I cut that part out and will refine and publish it in the near future as a separate post.

Here’s hoping there’ll be a future DevFest BCN 2012! :-)

So I’ve been thinking a lot about whom to write about and I’ve finally decided on an almost unknown woman: Sofia Watt.

You won’t be able to find much about her on Google, but her work helped me learn programming when I was 10 years old.

Back then, she and Miguel Mangada published several books on programming for children, in Spanish. They were titled Basic para niños, Logo para niños and Basic avanzado para niños (note: “para niños” means “for children”).

They introduced a fictional fluffy and colourful pet character, Arturo, and used him to guide the reader through very simple exercises that were a ton of fun too, although nowadays children in their 10s might find hard to believe the notion that printing “X”s on the screen is funny!

When I first started computer lessons we didn’t use any particular book. The teacher would just explain a bit about some new feature of Logo on the whiteboard, and we would play with it, see what we could come up with.

We were only two or three girls in the otherwise male classroom, but I remember occasionally looking at the cover of the book and thinking: Hey, a woman wrote this! It’s not only men in computers! I’d can totally do this too!

I learnt quite a lot with the book, so much that I ended up being quite respected among the rest of classmates, which hardly knew much about computers. It was pretty peculiar, because at first they bullied us, but then they wanted us to teach them our Logo tricks. Sometimes even a crowd would gather around our computer, when we got it to show flashing colours in the screen and what not, and the teacher would have to tell people to go back to their seats!

The next year we were told to use a mandatory BASIC textbook. It was a book sponsored by the Education Ministry and it was also DEAD BORING. So what did I do? I kept bringing my Basic for children textbook to the classroom, and used it for reference.

Years passed, and I stopped using these books, but their spirit still inspires me. When I have to document something, I always remember Arturo and the way things were introduced, trying to relate to the audience and making the concepts fun.

We need more Sofias!

***

If you want to take a look at the BASIC books, someone has kindly scanned and uploaded them to World of Spectrum.

The Logo book was way more colourful and had plenty of graphics, but I haven’t found it online, and don’t have a physical copy here, so you’ll have to take my word for it :-P

Finally, the keynote room opened its doors, and the considerable amounts of people waiting were able to slowly get in. I also noticed there was a lot more cameras and media people than yesterday, and I couldn’t but keep asking myself whether the journalists room/area had already been there yesterday, but I couldn’t remember.

In the hall, this time I got a seat, and not in the middle of a lot of people, so it was great. There wasn’t any countdown as in the first keynote, but there were lots of people taking pictures anyway, this time imitating the same gesture they do with their phones, but putting the tablets they got yesterday in the air instead, which makes it a bit embarrassing or annoying, depending on the moment.

The keynote started after having been politely asked to turn off “any hotspots” several times. I hadn’t used any of those before, but it seems portable hotspots are a big thing in the States. Or at least at the I/O… Anyway, it didn’t seem to work, since I still could find lots of wifi networks with my phone.

Vic appeared on stage again and quickly handed over to Sundar Pichai, which way less enthusiastic than Vic, and that was a bit of a downer. He described various nice feats achieved by the Chrome team since the last I/O, then handed to another guy who described more particular details, then that guy left the stage, and the cycle repeated. From all of what they announced, it seemed interesting they were just going to charge 5% for in-app payments… and made me wonder whether they would do the same with the Android market at some point. Now that would be cool! ;-)

There was the Chromebook and their pricing that got everyone clapping… well, except probably me. I couldn’t stop wondering whether they had considered the privacy implications of copying everything “to the cloud”, specially when we’re talking about corporate and educational environments migrating to use Chromebooks. And what with their customer support!? If it’s as good as the support for their other projects… (and I’ll leave it there) .

A good thing was that those machines will be jailbreakable. That always makes hardware more attractive (and relevant, in my opinion). But I can also foresee it doesn’t guarantee anything, specially if they get the same closed binary drivers issues we’re getting with Android. Which they will probably get, since they don’t have the latest word on the hardware those computers will be using, and it’ll be completely up to the vendors to integrate open source hardware or just proprietary stuff as usual.

Later the guy from that Angry birds game came up on stage to explain how awesome the newly ported to Chrome version was, and during all the time he was on stage praising the game and trying to convince me to play it (since it seems like I’m the only one who has yet to play it) I couldn’t stop wondering what took them that long to port it. My point is: since it worked on mobile phones, which are underpowered in comparison with full-fledged computers, there was no reason it wouldn’t work on a normal computer. It sounded like a bad excuse. Specially since mrdoob made his Chrome ball pool and Google Gravity experiments a couple of years ago already, and both used Box2D, with Javascript, way before v8 and jagermonkey were as fast as they are now. I truly didn’t understand anything, but I was surrounded by a mass of hysterical people and they looked at me and wondered why I wasn’t clapping like crazy too (and at the end I didn’t).

Then Aaron Koblin did a short intervention presenting a sneak peek for the Rome project, and then explained they had used three.js and mrdoob was working on the project too, and the die-hard fans in the front rows just went WOOOW YEEES WOHOOO crazy-crazy. It seems being honest about the libraries you’re using earns you lots of good karma ;-)

And when they finally announced they were going to send a Chromebook to every attendee in June–when it was a physical reality and in production, I thought the ceiling was going to collapse and the entire hall was going to fall down. Yesterday’s tablet announcement effect was nothing compared to this!

I immediately moved to another floor for Chris Pruett’s talk about building “aggressively compatible games for Android“. I’m not currently writing games but I’d like my apps to be playful and compatible with as many devices as possible, so I believe those were two valid reasons for attending the session! Some of its contents weren’t new to me, but there were some tips that I hadn’t heard of. For example, if a device doesn’t comply with the compatibility guidelines (and hence doesn’t pass the set of automated tests), Google won’t allow it to have the Google applications such as Maps, Market, etc. Which in other words means that if a phone has the Market application, it complies with a minimum set of requisites. It was also funny that Chris’s first words for the audience were “Hey folks”. Very looneytunesque, I loved it!

It was then time for a super very early lunch, since it was the only free time I’d had today between interesting sessions. As it happens, there was a huge amount of people already queuing, so I just joined the queue. Queueing was beginning to shape itself as the official alternative activity in the I/O!

I was a bit luckier with my table mates today, and we talked a bit about an assortment of things such as the food not being really Mexican, the ‘proper San Francisco hacking areas for coffee shop working’, etc.

When I finished, I tried to see if the tablet issue could be solved already, although it wasn’t 15h yet, and I had been told to go to that counter at that particular hour. As I kind of expected, they repeated me that again… so I went up for the Learning to love JavaScript session, but it had already started so it was slightly packed and hard to follow without a context, therefore I decided to simply grab a coffee and take it easy while waiting outside for the next session.

As I waited for the Evading pirates and stopping vampires session, an unknown guy approached me and asked what I did-did I develop Android stuff or…? I showed him Nerdstalgia and Instantanea, but he didn’t seem too impressed :-)

Then after I sat, another unknown guy asked me if the seat nearby was free. He sat and asked me if I was an Android developer … and then told me he came from Spain, so I just told him we could speak in Spanish then!

So he was from the Canary Islands, where they have an slightly different accent than in Peninsular Spain, and that had confused me at first. He was also an amazing connoisseur of Android phones. He knew all about the processors, available memory, small differences between consecutive models… really impressive. And he also told me that I should absolutely stay for the next session (in that very room), because one of the Sony-Ericsson guys had told him that if he was interested in the Xperia Play, the “Writing Android games in C++” session would “interest” him. It also “interested” me, so I decided to sacrifice the Chrome fireside chat in exchange for an hypothetical phone with joystick controls.
Multitouch is cool, but nothing beats a good old button.

The “anti-pirates” session clarified some concepts that were a bit blurry for me yet in regard to licensing, and Dan really insisted in us adding analytics to our applications and keeping track of various metrics in order to not only find out where are we doing wrong as developers but also what are the users doing with the app: how many times it’s launched, etc… and while I understand that it could work for a game, I’m not so sure about my current applications. I have to think about that, but for the moment it simply looks a bit too creepy, considering that Instantanea is already requiring GPS, external storage and camera permissions. If I was asked for internet permissions for a camera application, I don’t think I would allow the installation of that app. My paranoia would quickly kick in and say NO WAY.

On the other hand, I liked the way they proposed to convert casual pirates into customers, allowing some free play before popping up a “I have children to feed” dialog, while at the same time assuming that uberpirates will never be stoppable because they are way more determined to crack an app than we are to add complicated mechanisms to prevent that happening. I still am not totally sold on the whole licensing scheme; it usually adds more issues than solves.

The C++ session was half done by Dan too, and while I had read about the NDK, again there were some things I didn’t know yet, specifically the best way of dealing with OpenGL and GLSurfaceView’s quirks. And you guess what? The guy from the stand wasn’t lying. At the end of the session we were told to stay in the room for some interesting stuff, which was a card exchangeable for the phone on the Gear Pickup counter! Although I couldn’t but wonder whether they would just give me the phone or again make me visit the counter tomorrow :-D

On the way out I found Unai Landa, an old school Spanish demoscener, which as usual had forgotten my face and had to look at my badge to find out who I was :-P It has already happened twice already, once at Euskal party in 2003 and then in the way to the pmp in Madrid in 2005, so I just thought: old Unai, hasn’t changed!

And then, the deciding moment. Would they solve the mysterious tablet problem? I was slightly scared of trying, but I did so anyway…

And as it happens, I have written pretty much the entire post using the tablet!

For everything else, it’s pretty smooth, but the WordPress editor interface is a bit slow. Maybe it’s its Javascript which is slowing things down. I have to test it more before emitting a definitive opinion, but so far I like it more than the iPad form wise. It’s lighter and thinner… and has multitasking. So you can leave something updating or syncing and go to another activity more engaging than a progress bar, you know, that kind of things :-P And when you come back you don’t have to restart the download again (as it happens in other tablets).

Back to the I/O, once I picked the stuff I went to the “Lessons learned from Google Body” (for Android) session, and again most of the stuff I already knew, but it was a good wrap up with some new insights. And then… booh, the event was finishing quietly, without any bell or whistle, which was a bit sad after all the expectation of the keynotes. It felt as if something was missing.

So I went to the Larva Labs stand to see what they were up to and how things were going with their stand, and turns out they were giving away copies of a cute game they had developed, Gurk II. Well, actually you had to connect the phone to their computer and then they installed the game in your phone. It is an 8-bit style game and it’s got a very peculiar interface. And the music! Everything fits into place.

Things were coming to an end, and we had been gently invited to leave several times so that the vacuum cleaner could go through the areas we were in, so we finally exchanged twitter id’s and waved goodbye everyone. I went back to the hotel as fast as I could so that I wouldn’t be mugged by any of those strange characters that you can find in San Francisco, and found mr.doob there, furiously working on the ROME project (he actually went as far as staying up the rest of the night, and even made and commited some last minute fixes while waiting for boarding the plane to New York, where we are now for the Seven on Seven event).

But before leaving San Francisco I had the opportunity to briefly meet the super cool guys from the Data Arts Team at Google, which came up with the most super awesomely geek farewell ending that one could say these days:

See you at github!

It was a pleasure to meet you guys! :-)

To sum up: a very intense event. Maybe a bit too intense for only two days. Yes, the sessions are recorded and published almost immediately, but what I appreciate most from this sort of events is being able to talk with the speakers and ask them the questions, get their instant feedback, and maybe ask them another question, which I can’t do if I just stay home and watch prerecorded sessions. Most of the times there were many interesting sessions happening at the same time, so deciding which one to attend felt like a little sacrifice as I mentioned before. I understand the cost of running an event such as this one is quite high so probably they worked out that two days was the optimum amount of days in economical terms, but still, the suggestion is there for them to pick (or ignore, haha).

In regards to the goodies: wow, that even felt indecently rich. While other events do not even give you a sandwich, Google I/O feeds you and gives you stuff to develop with, apart from providing you with knowledge, which is the main point of a tech conference, of course. And it not only encourages to develop for these platforms, but also really helps a lot. First, because acquiring hardware is always an extra expense we cannot always afford, and secondly because as they are early versions of the hardware, when the final users got those “new” devices they won’t have to wait for applications that exploit it. So it’s not as if they are frivolous goodies–they are useful, and will be fed back into the system, somehow, as we develop and test applications with that new hardware we’ve been given. For example, we’ve been testing every app with the Evo 4G mr.doob got at 2010 I/O, and actually found differences that were impossible to notice (or very hard to track unless you get a report from a user) if we hadn’t tested the apps in the device.
is
So do I recommend it? Absolutely! I am super thrilled with all the knowledge I’ve acquired and I’m so looking forward to come back to London and start applying it (and watch the sessions I couldn’t attend). Meeting so many developers was also amazing. It really gives you a strong sense of community and involvement that I think is very important for any platform to succeed.

I still have a sort of doubt, and it is what is really Google’s strategy. Because they are really, really promoting Android, but obviously their business is in getting everyone to use the web more and so they are promoting the Chromebooks with everything in the cloud and etc… The best explanation I can think of is that they are taking risks (albeit quite huge obviously) and betting for several things to succeed instead of just resting on their laurels. Whoever strikes first… as they say. Let’s see what happens, but right now it is definitely disconcerting, both as user and as developer.

NOTE: This was supposed to be finished and published on the very day that the I/O ended (Wednesday the 13rd), but we spent almost the entire Thursday traveling and I didn’t finish revising it until today (Friday). So apologies if you were waiting for this second part desperately!

You had then two options: getting something for breakfast or going to grab some space for the keynote. I chose the first option because the queues had been at all the cafes I had gone past when walking to the Center, so I was dying for some coffee. And that’s the only thing that was left at that time anyway. Hungry geeks had devoured everything that was on offer.

So coffee on hand I went up, and up, to the third level where the huge keynote hall was. The setup was certainly impressive! And there wasn’t any place left already, unless you wanted to sit in between a mass of people, which I didn’t. So I sat on a side, on the floor. Since there is a carpet, and many additional screens showing the current speaker, it was OK. It was quite a relaxed atmosphere, a bit hippie even, on that area. Meanwhile, the people in the massive area of seating area were taking pictures like craaazy. I don’t think they managed to tweet many of them, anyway, either using their 3G/4G networks or wifi networks. There were just too freaking many devices at the same time in the same place–I tried plotting a graphic of the networks with Wifi analyzer and it simply couldn’t draw them all. It hang. So no wonder the wifi network didn’t work…

There was a huge clock on the screen depicting the time left until the keynote started, a sort of digital clock made up of balls which bounced. It only managed to get the people counting down aloud with the last 9 seconds, which was a bit disappointing–I was expecting something more hyped and very, very American, but I got the dose later.

And then the music kind of stopped, and there was a boom! and a voice introduced Vic Gundotra to the stage, who talked about how cool everything had been since last year. Then he introduced another guy in charge of Android (I didn’t know it but it seems this keynote was mostly Android centered) and then they showed an animation depicting a cute robot jumping mountains with numbers of activations on top, until it reached the 10th million. And then the delirious craziness started, with people cheering and clapping.

It kept that way with all the subsequent announcements. They actually were cool, as in Android devices becoming full USB hosts in 3.1, which means you can connect anything USB directly to an Android device. They showed this with… an XBOX controller. I somehow was picturing an Arduino connected to the phone… when then showed an Arduino based Android board! They also introduced another concept called Android @ Home (which reminded me of Seti @ Home), much on the spirit of the old Java idea of running Java in all sorts of devices, but without mentioning it of course. It was about domotics, special bulbs that could communicate with Android devices, sensors, etc, so you could program things like those and “build your own real farm game, where if you didn’t play the game, the plants actually died”. There were some other human-machine interaction demos such as a huge ball-in-the-hole board whose servos were controlled with a tablet connected to the Arduino based board mentioned before. They said in the future it would work with Bluetooth too, “and it would be all open source”.

Later the enthusiasm started to fade out. They showed an application for renting movies–kind of exciting, with its sync capabilities and ability to locally cache the movie so that you could watch it when you’re offline “in a plane”, plus the comfort of not having to use a cable or having the movie tied to any specific device. Once you rent a movie, it’s available in all your devices (including tablets or phones).

So far so good… and then they went on to announce the “Music Beta” program, which was probably a great MEH moment. After having shown the Movies which were quite spectacular in a way, they started with a kind of ugly app which… ran on Windows and Mac? Silence… and the guy doing the presentation stops like expecting huge claps, but they don’t come. He goes on, again stopping at certain moments when he expects the people to go crazy and over the top, but it just doesn’t work. I think people are just fed up of music/movies services. We want something different, and that’s why the initial presentations were well received-they were things we could tinker with, unlike these that only turn us into consumers :-P

Finally the craziness really ensued at the end, when the giveaway moment arrived: “And there’s this Samsung tablet, which no one else has access to… with one exception…” And he left an strategic silence after that, to allow for the YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHH YEEEEEEEEES WOOOOOOOOOO to take over. Some people even stood up and left at that very moment, even if the speaker was telling them there was no need to rush!

I waited, intrigued to see how people would act. Would they ran away in order to be first? Oh yes they did, but orderly. No one got hurt in the exit, no avalanches. An agglomeration of people in the doors–yes. Had this been held in Japan, I’m sure there would have been an orderly queue going around the hall ^^

I went to the room 11, the largest of all and mostly monopolised with Android sessions. I think I’ve read somewhere it’s got room for 1000 people. It was already packed full for the Honeycomb higlights session with Romain Guy and Chet Haase, so I just stayed on a side (again) since I was interested in the topic. This time I didn’t sit on the floor but stood, until someone left a free chair and I sat on it. Which was cool since I was also interested in the Pro Tips session by Reto Meier which followed (video), so I would just stay there afterwards. The Honeycomb session (video) was a good introduction to the new features, specially since I hadn’t had time to check them out yet. Nothing that you couldn’t learn by reading the tutorials, though, but it is nice to put a face to the people answering questions on Stack Overflow :-)

And the Pro Tips session had some very interesting stuff–juicy bits that I’ll apply for sure and some good ideas, specially in regards to the way to run closed betas, with A/B testing, etc, which I hadn’t thought of (yet). Apparently Reto was also auto-tweeting his session with a software he had been writing these days, which was kind of funny too. Being on the bleeding edge, he made the presentation running out of a tablet, which has its risks–it hung when showing a video, but he said it had only happened once before, and never on the rehearsals. It didn’t happen again once he rebooted the device, though (phew!).

It was now lunch time. And the mass of people moved downstairs to the ground floor. It was somehow like a scene from zombies movie, with all the geeks going down the escalators, eyes aimed at one goal only–either the tablet-giveaway desk or the lunch area. Most of them went to the lunch which was divided in two zones, the “Hot dogs” and the “Salads”. Since I’m already scared of the sizes of servings and portions here, opted for the salads area, which had some funny options but my favourite one was the “Mediterranean marinated tofu”. Which had as much of Mediterranean as I have of American (i.e. nothing!) Other than having strange and bizarre names which didn’t correspond to the reality of things, the food was tasty and there was plenty of it, except of the desserts which were like macaroons and there was none left when I finished my comparatively small portion of salad, but I had a coconut ice cream which wasn’t bad.

There weren’t any thematic tables this year, unlike what mrdoob had described me about last year, so I just chose one at random. I probably chose a wrong one, since there was hardly any socialising going on, but that was OK–I was hungry and didn’t feel like talking too much anyway!

After that I attempted to get my tablet (see, I didn’t rush) but the girl at the gear counter told me someone had already picked mine (who?! with my ID?!) so I should contact registration services. Time for the next session was close so I thought I would contact them later, and went to the session which was the Android fireside chat, where some Android developers would answer questions either sent to them online or from the public in the room. It was a pity that some questions couldn’t be answered either because of not being “authorised” to answer them, not having authority to do so, or just because the person who could answer that wasn’t there. Android being such a huge project has lots of separation in the roles and people are very specialised.

And I closed the sessions with Android@Google which was a bit disappointing, since I expected to hear more of Guido and less of the other guy (sorry Wesley Chun, I know you’ll understand it). It had a funny point, when Wesley showed how he scripted PowerPoint with Tcl/Tk in order to build his slides instead of using PowerPoint directly. But why do that when you could just write HTML or uhm… write a converter from his own markup-sort of language for slides to Open Office slides format? well he surely has his reasons for doing that, but that Tcl/Tk solution seemed overkill to me, albeit surely funny :-P

When that finished I went upstairs again for the Android team “Office hours”, which consisted in this: the Android developers would be in the “office” area and you could just show up and ask them questions. Again, this proved a bit if a problem if the question you asked couldn’t be answered because the person who knew about that particular topic wasn’t there at that moment–which happened to me! But fortunately I had other questions so I had the chance to personally speak to Chet Haase, Romain Guy, Ficus Kirkpatrick (who’s the tech lead at the Market) and even the mighty Tim Bray–poster of pretty much all the posts in the Android Developers blog! I joked with him about this, and he told me that’s because he’s the one who revises the posts, gets the developers to write, and all that. Overall, they are very nice people and even though the have you considered allowing developers to reply to comments in the market? question must have been asked to him something like 1023109381023981203 times only this afternoon, Ficus still answered quite patiently, so that’s really a feat by itself (I don’t think I would have been so polite once being asked something for the third or fourth time).

Later I spent some time chatting with the guys from Larva Labs, who not only are very nice people too but also co-developed the Androidify application which can provide for some funny moments. And then I went back downstairs to see what was wrong with the mysterious tablet… only to be told something very Spanish: “Vuelva usted mañana”. Let’s see what happens tomorrow ;-)

There was a party titled “Infinite play” or something like that. It was held on the main hall (where the keynote had been), and they had removed all the chairs and placed lots of gadgets and stuff instead. The big screen was occupied displaying visuals that looked quite similar to iq‘s works, which is pretty understandable since the collective doing them was sexyvisuals, to whom he belongs, and there was someone live-coding them which I bet was him. I would have liked to check that out by myself and wave hi to Íñigo, but the extremely paranoical security guys wouldn’t allow me to even have a look from far away. Mental, I tell you! And I don’t know why they hid their vj’s???! Anyway, after I had checked all the stands and saw the crazy dancing Android (yes, there was another one of those here–did you even doubt it? ;-)), I ate a couple of cookies glaced with the Google TV and YouTube logo respectively (it’s weird to say I ate a Google TV and YouTube) and went out of the hall. It was getting quite crowded, my backpack was heavy and I was tired and wanted to go back to some quietness at the hotel before sunset and the strange people began to wander in the streets.

Still I had ingested so much caffeine during the afternoon that I couldn’t sleep so I decided to write this instead :-D

Conclusion of the day: It’s pretty obvious that the biggest selling point for Google (at least in this conference) is Android. It got the biggest room, the most cheers and drew the most interest of people exhibiting and talking about it. Next to it is HTML5, WebGL and etc. The other technologies and stuff–they are boring already.

Looking forward to tomorrow \o/