Google Data

By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor

Did you participate in Google I/O last week? Nearly 1 million people did, by attending in person in San Francisco, gathering at dozens of I/O Extended events around the world, or watching the live streamed keynotes and sessions on YouTube.


Google I/O pushed an enormous amount of information out into the world. Here on this blog, we did our part by publishing many posts about new Google announcements, along with a bunch of guest posts written by developers. Because there were so many posts last week, I figured you might have missed some, so I want to highlight a couple of them here.

In this post, Cameron Henneke writes about his experience developing GQueues Mobile, a task manager app. Cameron discusses the trade-offs developers have to think about when coding for mobile platforms. Should you develop in HTML or go native? What are the advantages to each? How will that choice affect development? What do your users really want? Cameron’s post contains a thorough and candid discussion of his decision-making process.

Another post describes a versatile new technology called near field communication (NFC) and how doubleTwist uses it to share information from one Android device to another. NFC provides a super-low overhead way for two devices to exchange a small amount of data, and doubleTwist’s post not only demonstrates a practical use of NFC in an app, but also provides a lot of sample code to show how they did it.


Finally, I was pretty busy during Google I/O and I didn’t get to see all the sessions I wanted. Luckily, it’s not too late for anybody to experience more of I/O by watching session videos on YouTube. For my weekend nerd fun, I plan to grab some popcorn and go here. When it’s time to take a break, I can even rock out with Jane's Addiction on the After Hours video. Party!