Thoughts from a Techie

The Android app is bracing the navigation drawer design cues from (most recently) Drive, Music, Books and Magazine. Other than that, nothing much. I must try it first before providing any (useful) insights. Guess no one is better than Google at helping us organize our lives. See the official blog post with the video at  http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2013/05/a-new-inbox-that-puts-you-back-in.html

Clear clues taken from the Music app design - that button and that swipe to show the sidebar. A hint to what's next in Google's design language?  

My primary comp is not good enough for the new Maps. Luckily enough I'm helping my friend reinstalling his comp, so I thought I could give it a drive for the sole purpose of testing. The new Maps is immersive and impressive. I get an almost full screen Maps view all the time (Explore view and detail cards only pop out when I click on them. And they give very useful information.) The vector-based maps seem to load faster also, and the animations are fairly smooth, given the unstable performance of the test unit. Only one slight annoyance though. It defaults to US and I have to search for 'Singapore' to get to my place. Well a more 'location-aware' Maps would be nice. I would expect an even faster Maps as the final product. Highly recommend everyone to sign up for the preview, if you have a decent computer with Chrome.

Hangouts app replacing the default Talk app.

This is a talk I highly recommend everyone to watch. It's amazing how they build such a great user experience across the board in the most subtle of things.

Pretty cool stuff here. Love how the iPhone racer speeds out of the track and gets the last place. Will try when I get my device. g.co/racer

Beautiful and clean UI. Just a bit laggy on my ancient netbook, which means it would be lovely on a normal laptop!

All timestamps are in UTC. Unedited, pull straight from my Twitter using TwimeMachine, tweaked on Notepad++. Wed May 15 16:04:38 #io13 time! Wed May 15 16:07:53 First keynote with Sundar Pichai as head of both Chrome and Android #io13 Wed May 15 16:11:34 900 million Droids Wed May 15 16:22:30 That's a bunch of awesome Play services updates... #io13 Wed May 15 16:25:53 ...plus Play game services! Cloud saves, Leaderboards and... Multiplayer matchmaking #io13 Wed May 15 16:26:11 RT @engadget: Google Play game services aims to integrate gaming across Android, iOS and the web, available today - http://t.co/o2txbQfaRq … Wed May 15 16:27:54 Demo hiccups are definitely part of the show... #io13 Wed May 15 16:31:28 Android Studio #io13 Wed May 15 16:48:24 Play Music All Access #io13 Wed May 15 16:55:28 AOSP on Samsung Galaxy S4??? #io13 Wed May 15 16:58:19 RT @googlechrome: Humbled by growth of #chrome since #io12. We've reached over 750M active Chrome users worldwide #io13...

Cards UI in action.

Thought of moving to Blogger a few days ago. Made the move just now. Lots of things to be settled and posts to be moved from my old presence... But a new beginning is always great.