{"id":567,"date":"2008-05-31T00:36:55","date_gmt":"2008-05-31T07:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=567"},"modified":"2020-09-28T19:29:21","modified_gmt":"2020-09-29T02:29:21","slug":"google-io-wrapup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/567\/","title":{"rendered":"Google I\/O Wrapup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Android<\/p>\n

Photo by SeanOsteen<\/a> \"Creative<\/a> Some rights reserved<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The two days I spent Google I\/O were an exciting whirlwind of running from presentation to presentation, and much to my surprise, eating!<\/strong> I didn’t think I’d ever praise the food at a tech conference but as a couple Googlers pointed out, with Google the food is always good. The usual conference fare is a box lunch consisting of a sandwich, apple, bag of chips and cookie. Not for I\/O though, Google set up three “Cafes”, a grill, a deli and a Mexican cafe. The tri-tip at the Mexican cafe on the first day was scrumptious and natural beef hot dogs and Angus burgers at the Grill on Thursday weren’t bad either. Then there was the party Wednesday evening; sushi, pasta, grilled salmon and chocolate fountains washed down with a nice Charles Krug Rutherford Cab.<\/p>\n

So beside noshing I picked up quite a few mobile tidbits. In the buzz around Android, I think some of the Google Gears announcements may have been overlooked. First of all Gears has been “debranded”, no more Google Gears, it’s just Gears now. The name change was made to stress the Open Source nature of the project which includes a community of over 500 contributors, many from outside Google.<\/p>\n

During I\/O Opera and Google announced that Gears is coming to Opera 9.5 on both the desktop and mobile. It with be Windows Mobile only at first, but both UIQ and S60 versions of Opera 9.5 with Gears are in the pipeline. Up to now we’ve mostly been hearing about using Gears’ local server and database storage to provide off line browsing, but there’s another piece than sounds interesting for mobile web apps. Gears provides asynchronous worker threads that can synchronize local data in the background without blocking. I can see this being useful for things on mobile like live sports updates, RSS readers and Webmail.<\/p>\n

The Gears team is working on something else that should really get mobile web developers salivating – a location provider accessed by a simple JavaScript call. It returns the device’s current location using data from any of several sources including GPS, cell ids, the database of WiFi locations that Google has been building or IP address. There was no timeline given for when the location api would be released but working code was shown and demoed at I\/O<\/p>\n

Other new Gears features in development that were demoed included the ability to resume uploads and downloads, and a new file picker dialog supporting selection of multiple files. Gears is coming to Safari and Android too. As they are both WebKit based, I imagine that means we will see it on Nokia’s WebKit browser eventually.<\/p>\n

There was more Android news too. The last session of the mobile track at I\/O was a Fireside Chat<\/em> with Andy Rubin who heads the Android project along with Engineering Director Steve Horowitz and six of the tech leads. The format was audience members asking questions which were fielded by various members of the team. Here are my notes:<\/p>\n