CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-21 20:35:16 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 14 +1s)

Alright! A bunch of the YouTube talks from Google I/O are up! Here's a playlist with the ones that have been posted so far.

Shameless plug: playlist will start playback on my talk, Mobile Development with YouTube: Best Practices. Enjoy!

2013-05-21 14:54:11 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Really cool feature of the new Google Hangouts app for Android/iOS/web? In a group chat, if you and your friends post photos, they'll be accessible at http://plus.google.com/photos under the "Albums" link!

2013-05-20 19:53:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Added photos to Google I/O 2013.

2013-05-22 17:23:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

Some pictures from my phone of the YouTube team at Google I/O 2013. Apologies for the few random ones. Now ... let's play around with the auto-enhance a bit!

#io13  

2013-05-17 08:18:56 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Initial feedback on Hangouts app has been positive. Folks are glad they can message straight from their broswers!

One guy on iOS couldn't install the app, however. I'll find out what's up.

2013-05-16 20:04:03 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

Keeps getting better and better...

2013-05-15 19:24:50 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Oh man....I already have a Nexus 4 but a Google Experience Galaxy S4 is super tempting ...

2013-05-15 05:59:13 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 18 +1s)

Only a few hours left until Google I/O 2013. Whew! Practice my session one more time, or go to sleep early and get some exercise to start off the day?

2013-05-14 00:43:04 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 20 +1s)

I'm the YouTube team mule for #io13. The rental car is packed FULL of goodies for those of you that are coming!

For the rest of you that can't make it, don't worry. I'll be trying to figure out ways for you guys to get in on some of this!

2013-05-13 22:18:53 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Go 1.1 is officially out! I love the picture of the gopher in the plane.

2013-05-11 17:16:16 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 8 +1s)

If you've ever heard me rant about Dan Brown, you'll get a kick out of this.

2013-05-10 17:58:14 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

This one is for you iOS users out there:

I am really enjoying this game. First off, it's Sid Meier of Civilization and Pirates game. I love turn based combat games. It's not a terribly complicated game, but it's surprisingly satisfying to corner an Axis flying ace and shoot them out of the sky. 

It's free to download and seems to have a not-obnoxious in-app purchase model for monetization. After you play a couple of missions and get hooked, you can unlock a few more missions for $0.99, or a whole bunch of missions for $3.99 (plus some other customizations) - I did this right away. I really hope these guys can make money - it'd be great to get some great examples of games that do in app purchases without punching you in the face to buy things. Another game that I think does this really well is Strikefleet Omega (Google Play... more »

2013-05-09 19:35:18 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I think I'm going to subscribe to the documentaries channel!

2013-05-08 19:41:17 (7 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

These comments on this +Android Police post are eye opening about what people expect now with regards to game pricing.

What are all your expectations now for game quality when you spend $5? 

---

"The other problem, and the one that keeps me from giving it a positive recommendation, is that it's expensive and relies too much on online play. Nine missions isn't enough offline content at $5, and no one is playing online."

Do you have any idea how much money and time it takes to develop a game of this type? $5 is now too expensive? $5? Not enough content? for FIVE DOLLARS?

Has the freemium model skewed reality this much?

----

A person responds, "If you price at $4-5 you need to deliver extremely high quality."

2013-05-01 14:11:46 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 16 +1s)

My session is online in the Google I/O 2013 schedule!

If you can't make it, the content will be recorded and put online, and at a future date, I'll likely spend more time walking through the code in a YouTube Developers Live show.

2013-04-24 13:49:14 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 6 +1s)

Having a rough day? This'll cheer you up.

2013-04-23 17:44:36 (5 comments, 3 reshares, 11 +1s)

While I'm not going to knock free dinner, I think it's a great thing when tech startup CEOs start preaching sanity. More power to these guys!

2013-04-22 13:17:22 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

What's coming in Java 8? Pretty cool stuff (... if you're into that sort of thing).

2013-04-11 03:12:25 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 22 +1s)

21st floor of the Gangnam Finance Center in Seoul, where Google Korea is housed. In this photo are some folks from the Android team meeting and +Soonson Kwon in a meeting.

Android DevRel is hiring in Korea, I hear. Check us out on developers.google.com/jobs!

2013-04-02 10:35:49 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 19 +1s)

One of the most frustrating things about being an Android developer is having to deal with decisions that are made or features that are ignored because iOS cannot do something that Android can.

2013-04-02 03:32:46 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

I still remember a few years ago... I think it was September or August of 2009. I got a phone call from +Artem Russakovskii telling me about this great blog idea he had. "Tips for geeks", he said.

"Dude, I like it," I replied, "but I don't know about the mass appeal."

"I was also thinking about starting an Android blog," he answered.

"Oh man...that sounds pretty neat. Especially if this Android thing takes off. I've really wanted to work on an official Android client here [at LinkedIn], but they decided that WebOS was a higher priority so we worked on that instead." I was getting excited. "I'd love to help you. Only thing is...I've accepted a job at Google. I'm pretty sure I can't help you. Plus, I'm busy with this App Engine book I've been working on[1]. Best of luck, man. See you at... more »

2013-04-01 14:33:23 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I know this is an April's Fool's joke, but I am actually on board with this. Clojure, except with brackets instead of parentheses.

2013-03-30 21:32:09 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Here's a tool I've used a few times in various Android samples. I've simplified and greatly generalized this from some code I helped write for a friend. This class helps fetch lots of images in a background thread pool, executing a callback on a main thread when complete. This code caches the images locally, opting to fetch first from the cache before fetching from a remote source. There are lots of improvements that can be made here:

- Code to clear the cache, because if we use this heavily this can fill up disk first
- Code to sort the cache in a FIFO way such that when we approach a limit, we clear out the cache
- A local, in-memory cache using HashMap<String, SoftReference<Bitmap>> that is relatively short-lived in case we need to scroll back and forth between a large set of images so we don't even need to hit the disk first
- Generalize to all... more »

2013-03-27 21:18:52 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Love it.

2013-03-22 16:31:12 (19 comments, 1 reshares, 14 +1s)

Confirmed: Feedly is a great replacement for me and probably my new home page. I get RSS as well as a stock ticker (what I use iGoogle for nowadays). Thank you +Louis Gray for introducing this!

So new problem: how do I pay you to keep working on this service?

2013-03-21 20:34:54 (5 comments, 4 reshares, 7 +1s)

If you aren't sold yet on "PostgreSQL is pretty freakin' awesome", check out this set of slides.

It's hard, though, because we all just know MySQL, and it's really hard to step away from something you know to something you don't at times.

2013-03-20 20:23:55 (10 comments, 98 reshares, 91 +1s)

If you plan on developing in Java with any Google APIs: YouTube API, Drive API, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and others, watch this show if you want to see how to import and build projects using Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA! It's pretty easy, but if you've never worked with Maven before could be confusing. I'm hoping this show demystifies the process for you guys.

2013-03-19 16:40:41 (7 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

A bunch of us have been really excited about this for a long time. I can't wait to see what people do with it. Congrats to +Brian Cairns and the rest of the team in Boulder!

Also, if you've been resisting learning JavaScript (I can understand why; the language certainly has its warts), you have yet one more reason why you should get with the times and go where the technology is.

2013-03-18 20:08:43 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 9 +1s)

My one big takeaway from these talk slides is this comic (also interesting if you are curious about Python async IO)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xknbe58zcvjhzhv/PyCon2013.pptx

2013-03-15 00:15:02 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 14 +1s)

Best friends: a dog and a lion. My favorite video this week.

2013-03-13 17:28:24 (10 comments, 4 reshares, 22 +1s)

WOW! Huge news today!

2013-03-12 01:17:09 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

We saw dolphins!

2013-03-01 15:33:30 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

"Only amateurs attack machines; professionals attack people."

2013-02-27 15:48:51 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

Alright, it's up! Here's the show +Arun Nagarajan and I did introducing how to integrate Google Drive with the YouTube developer platform. 

Sorry about the delay. We had some technical issues getting this video online. The first 30 seconds or so got cut off, so when you start playing the video, you're going to see some weird, out of context banter about why I am dressed up. Don't worry: if the first 30 seconds didn't get cut off, that banter would probably have been just as weird.

2013-02-26 20:42:58 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Because we know you can't get enough of YouTube on Google Developers Live this week: in addition to Wednesday's normally scheduled show (focusing on WebM and VP8), our own +Ikai Lan chats with +Arun Nagarajan from the Google Apps Script team later today about using the YouTube APIs from within Apps Script code.

Tune in later today, at 2pm EST/11am PST for the Apps Script show!

2013-02-26 15:21:22 (3 comments, 25 reshares, 17 +1s)

"Everybody in this world should learn how to program a computer... because it teaches you how to think."

- Steve Jobs

2013-02-26 14:03:45 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

This is my first time reading the Valve employee handbook, and it is a hoot. Lots of interesting stuff here. Sounds like Gabe Newell has some great ideas about creating a company!

2013-02-22 15:02:10 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 7 +1s)

I feel like these guys have it backwards. Come up with the idea, come up with the problem you're trying to solve, wireframe, simplify the wireframe, then worry about the implementation.

2013-02-21 15:47:32 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

It's up! Here's me interview Mark and Sandeep from Buzzfeed on yesterday's YouTube Developers Live show.

There are a few interesting bits here about what they've learned about building a mobile app, the importance of mobile app for curation sites, the importance of analytics and A/B testing. Nothing world shattering, but there are some interesting learnings here. 

2013-02-21 05:05:25 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Took long enough for this app to be Nexus 7 compatible. Download away!

2013-02-20 17:18:54 (6 comments, 4 reshares, 18 +1s)

This is sick. If you're using Android 4.2+ you HAVE to install this widget by +Roman Nurik (who now sits about 15 feet away from me on the new floor in NY!).

2013-02-19 16:26:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

On this show, +Ikai Lan will be talking to Sandeep and Mark from Buzzfeed about how they use the YouTube API in their mobile app.

2013-02-13 23:42:50 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

Request queuing and load balancing is not something you ever think about - until it bites you, that is. 

Now imagine Heroku did autoscaling - that'd add a whole new layer of complexity to this whole queuing, routing mess. No one's ever happy because it never works exactly the way you expect it too. I was knee deep in it when I worked on App Engine.

2013-02-06 15:57:13 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

Forgot to post this a few days back - it's my swan song blog post before leaving the Apps Script team to the YouTube team. Check out their shows!

2013-02-06 17:57:00 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

The greater YouTube/Google TV DevRel team posing in Los Angeles after the Hackathon.

2013-02-01 23:10:01 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Eric Schmidt's daughter Sophie recounts their visit of North Korea. Super fascinating read.

2013-02-01 20:20:17 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 10 +1s)

I want this, even though I am more than double the max recommended age.

2013-01-28 07:53:57 (1 comments, 7 reshares, 9 +1s)

What an exhausting, exhilarating weekend with great teammates and equally great hackers! I'm proud to say the Los Angeles YouTube/Google TV Hackathon (#ythackla) was one of the most fun hackathons I've had the fortune of being a part of.

Thank you all for coming out. I had a blast meeting and talking to all of you.

2013-01-27 13:56:03 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 23 +1s)

This is what a hackathon looks like at 2:30am. #ythackla

2013-01-28 04:36:00 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 10 +1s)

Added photos to Hack The Tube: LA Video Hackathon Demo Nite Live Stream.