The latest buzz around the geek world apart from FIFA 14 world cup is the Google I/O 14. As you may know Google I/O is the annual developers conference held in San Fransisco, California. This dev con is being held on 25-26 June,14. To engage more attendees around the world Google has released an official app for Google I/O 14. I had some spare time so went through the app, and found that is has some real power packed features.
The first thing which anyone would see in this app would be the launch screen where all the events are listed in a grid sort of layout, which has its own Google sort of look and feel. If you don’t know what I mean have a look at the image below.
From this screen you can tap on any of the items and open a detailed popup window for that item. Being a developer I must say all the widgets, layouts or components used in this Google I/O 14 app are pretty neat and clean. What I am trying to say here is that nothing new or out of the box thinking is applied in this app, but still from an end users perspective its a great app. As it has great amounts of power packed stuff in it.
For e.g. Google I/O 14 app uses the Indoor Maps feature of Google Maps API v2. This allows the user to view the indoor maps of a building for each floor. In this app user can navigate to the maps section by two ways. First by swiping from left to right which opens a navigation drawer and then selecting the maps item from there. Second by tapping on top context menu maps button in the details popup event item.
Indoor maps is a new feature in Google Maps, this allows user to view the insides of a building. Its just like from Batman or Mission Impossible movie. The interesting part is that its real now and its used very smartly in this app. In the Google I/O 2014 Android app if you tap on maps from any event it directly points you to the location of that event on the map, so you can plan your way to it. A next level feature could have been the direction to it, but hey something is always left for a 2.0.
Other than this Google I/O 14 app has the standard features like maintaining a schedule, hash tagging on social networks like Google+.
More things that you can do with this app is sync your schedule with Google calender so that you don’t miss it.
Although all of this sums up to be great but to my dismay this app has one annoying bug as well, this app keeps on closing on going back. For e.g. if you go from All Sessions screen to My Schedule screen and press the back you are thrown out of app. Hope its improved in the next version. Apart from this its still a very useful app therefore if you are going to the Google I/O 14 don’t forget to download it from Google Play.
Born in New Delhi, India. A software engineer by profession, an android enthusiast and an evangelist. My motive here is to create a group of skilled developers, who can develop something new and good. Reason being programming is my passion, and also it feels good to make a device do something you want. In a very short span of time professionally I have worked with many tech firms. As of now too, I am employed as a senior engineer in a leading tech company. In total I may have worked on more than 20 projects professionally, and whenever I get spare time I share my thoughts here at Truiton.
