Hey everyone,
So I know I’ve been very inactive with this blog lately, due to reasons previously outlined. However, I have found that I now probably have enough time to start working on things outside of work and school once again. So, hopefully I’ll have time to get back on here and start providing decent content again.
I wanted to talk a little about yesterday’s Google I/O. For those not in the know, Google I/O is a once a year conference that Google puts on to talk about essentially all of their products. They showed a lot of pretty awesome things that I’m excited about, and it got me thinking – I loathe Facebook, and the only reason I actually use it is because I know so many people on there, and because other people actually use it. However, after the updates to Google+ yesterday, I no longer see any reason to stick with Facebook – the amazing streams, auto tagging, image work, and beautiful UI is more than enough to push me to finally make the actual switch.
So I exported all of my images on Facebook to Google+ – there are a few downfalls when it comes to organizing your photos in albums and moving them among your separate albums, but otherwise I’m not looking back; I love finding content based on my interests inside of my Social Streams, and I think that it’s a far superior way to find content.
Beyond this, I’ve decided to start trying to use Google Services in places where I would normally use a different platform where I can (I need to use Skype for work, otherwise I’d be all over the new Hangouts platform to video call – Speaking of, the new hangouts extension in Chrome is a life saver on mac and beautiful as well).
ALSO, and perhaps most importantly for this blog; Google put out Google Studio – an IDE to develop Android Apps! I downloaded it yesterday just to see how it looks, and it’s a VAST improvement over the previous offerings. No longer do developers have to use clunky Eclipse plug ins to get the best AndroidDev experience. The new Google Studio is based off of IntelliJ Idea, which most people find to be a better platform. This essentially makes my two most popular blog posts on here a moot point, however – as they talked about getting set up with Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea. In the coming week or so, I’ll be digging a bit further into Google Studio, and I’ll probably toss up a quick guide and my impressions of the tool. That said – the developer community will most likely be PACKED with similar things, so in the meanwhile check them out!
The only additional things I would have liked to see come out of yesterday’s event are an updated Nexus 4 with potentially higher storage amounts and to see Google Play Music come to Canada – I love a good music streaming service.
That’s it for my little rantings today, hopefully there’ll be more to come from me in the next little while.
Signing off,
Hunter J