An Overview to Google I/O ’19
Etermax attended this year edition and tells you all about the biggest technology event around the world.
Google I/O '19 finished and in Etermax we are very excited about all the announcements and new tools in which Google has been working on. Our expectations were high having participated in previous editions announcements and they did not disappoint us at all.
Hey Google, Let's play Trivia Crack!
Etermax, as a game company, feels very proud every time that one of its games entertain new audiences around the world. We are excited to announce that Trivia Crack is the most played game in Google Assistant today. Find Trivia Crack in Assistance and try it by yourself just asking “Hey Google, let's play Trivia Crack"
Google Keynote
The Keynote was full of announcements about accessibility and augmented reality. With the power of Lens and working with some partners they were capable to do, in example, that our food orders be easy and accessible as much as renting a car or a flat for a few days.
Now, you can select more wisely your meal in a restaurant by pointing your camera over the menu and see it becoming alive to tell you what is your selection about, give some recommendations and even calculate the tip on the your check, all with your phone.
Whether you are not capable to read some text from an important sign in the street or you just need to understand sensible information in a different language, you can also use Google Lens for a live translation in your screen and audible too.
There are some great news in Google Maps with augmented reality too. Can you imagine yourself navigating through the streets like if you were really into your phone? Fine, you don't need to imagine it anymore! Try it right now directly from your Pixel.
Google Assistant comes with excellent advances in the way we “get things done”. They call new Assistant version as the “Next Generation Assistance”. On Pixel devices you will be able to talk the assistance fluidly and it will follow your commands like it would be a real conversation. Moreover, the assistant will maintain the context of your previous actions when you request something new.
New Drive Mode is also a very useful feature. Once in your car, you can handle the drive by just using your voice. The assistant will suggest places according your reservations, remember paused podcasts you can resume and, the most important thing, if you receive a call, it will ask you if you want to take the call or not.
Google is one of the companies that invest effort and resources working with those who have all kind of problems and incapabilities, trying to use technology to improve their life. That's why they had introduced Live Caption; a new single-button option which will enable caption on every video, podcast or moment. This makes audible things, also be readable. And the best is that this works completely offline, on the device with Android Q. Qte, right?
Android Q is what we all were waiting for, and of course, it comes with some improvements about Security and Privacy. Users will be able to grant more granular permissions to apps, as Location, by allowing them to use it while running the app, always or never.
However, one of the most waited for all users around the world is Dark Mode.
The only thing we must do as developers is to follow some guidelines and Android Q will just do the job for us. If you are one of those devs who can't wait to the final release, you can always enroll yourself into the beta program.
5G will be available soon and Android Q has full support for this new generation of mobile network. Although this technology will be used by lot of people in 2020, Android prepares itself for the arriving.
Kotlin comes first
Besides the imminent release of Android Q, this should be the most exciting announcement on software development this year: Kotlin comes first. But, what does this mean? How Kotlin will come first? Well… you'll see a lot of Kotlin code on new versions of Android Jetpack, like Navigation, DataBinding and ConstraintLayout. They will keep providing support for Java developers, but we shouldn't see any new feature written in Java. What's more, some component in Jetpack will be supporting kotlin coroutines, as well as RxJava.
A new series of events will be hosted around the world for those who love kotlin and want to know all about it. This events will be called Kotlin / Everywhere and you will be able to join them between June and December 2019.
Machine Learning from Zero to Hero
We highly recommend this talk if you always wanted to know what does machine learning means and how does it work but you didn't know where to start.
Incredible new things could be achieved using machine learning combined with ARCore since its launch but this year, Google has duplicated efforts and created a Lite version of its TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite. With this, you train your model on TensorFlow and download it to run it offline on your project. This makes, for example, object recognition faster because the inference is made locally on user's device. This technology is currently available for Android, however Google engineers are working on a Swift version of TensorFlow.
Tools, Components and… more Kotlin
As we mentioned before, Google decided that Kotlin comes first but that’s not the only thing they had decided this year. The engineers teams focused on making the development tools and libraries more robust, less buggy and kotlin friendly.
Android Jetpack
Compose is a new tool to design your views directly from the code avoiding the double file existance (xml/kt). This isn't new to Flutter developers because the idea of this feature was inspired from there.
Compose is not currently available but we will see a lot of discussion about it in the next months until its final release.
Constraint Layout 2.0.0 … -alpha
This I/O edition present us a great improvement over ConstraintLayout. For those who don’t use it (or worse, don’t know about it) let me tell you that this is something you don't wanna miss. It's a great tool to make your layouts lightweight, performant and understandable.
But, why are we so excited about this new release? The answer is…
MotionLayout
MotionLayout is a completely new tool to animate your views. You can add transitions, movements, combine elements, change its properties and also, combine different MotionLayouts to create even more beautiful and original animations.
With this, the team behind ConstraintLayout 2.0 created new Helpers to allow developers code more understandable and reusable views. You can use the provided Helpers (like Flows) or create your owns.
All this new features and improvements have their respective tools which will be available onto the upcoming Android Studio 3.5. Navigation flows will be very easy to create and maintain, Resource Manager comes with optimizations and features, Profiler has new Power Consumption analysis and of course, the general optimizations and bug fixing we all were waiting for.
One more year has passed and one more time Etermax came back from Google I/O with its expectations met, renewed energies and prepared to create good products and get things done.
