Google I/O is here yet again with lots of shiny new things. Including Chromebook Pixel devices for all attendees. I'll be curious to see it in person, as a coworker is in attendance.

First off, I want to keep this thread positive. The comments at the end of the keynote from Page about negativity came at an interesting time for me today too, and it has me in a mood to really reject snide/negative snipes. I'm doing my best to reduce my own habit of these. And I hope Google does improve too. Page's words were good, but the actions of the company reflect a different vision then what he spoke of.

Anyhow, of interest to me out of today:

Google Play is gaining the ability for developers to publish alpha and beta builds through the service. The release engineer in me sees this as a great thing, as it treats the release process with the same steps as needed for shipping a product. I'll be watching the specific session tomorrow for more.

Google APIs are being moved more out of the Android OS later, and more as components updated via Google Play. It's kinda sad to see this being necessary, but clearly their past attempts to get OS updates out quickly to all Android users have failed. I hope they continue to try and improve that situation, but at least updating APIs will help developers greatly.

Two new interesting APIs to show up are location and gaming. Location on Android may in theory work more like iOS, where programmers don't have to deal with switching between location providers (GPS, WiFi, etc), and the OS can more centralize location needs to improve battery life. Also coming in is Geofencing. I'm glad Google is copying what they see is good from iOS and other platforms, as it brings benefits to the users. Gaming wise, centralized matchmaking, achievements and such are coming. Very similar to what XBox Live and Steam popularized and have since been copied by iOS, Sony and others.

Google Play Books will now accept epub and pdf files from peoples personal collections. This addresses one of my bigger surprises from last year with the Nexus 7 trial. May dig it out and try reading again.

Google will be selling a Nexus like version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 soon, though I question the commitment to solid updates after what happened with the Nexus S. Hopefully it being on AT&T and T-Mobile, and away from Verizon is a sign it will be better.

VP9. Not really happy to see this one, as it shows Google is interested in continuing to split the industry on video standards. I understand the open argument, but it still seems this is too late with H.265/HVEC having been finalized in January. Google wants better video standards to lower their bandwidth bill for YouTube. Doing it at the cost of users battery life due to lack of hardware acceleration seems bad. H.265 decoder chips are already likely in development, set to become replacements for where H.264 thrives today. What manufacturer is going to want to toss in 2 decoders, one for H.265 and one for VP9? I guess we will see how it plays out, but VP8 didn't really make an impact like many had hoped. The same strategy for VP9 doesn't seem likely to succeed.