OK Google. Tell me the future.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/14/43313 ... le-io-2013

Anyone been following this?

The most significant announcement seems to be the update to Maps.

I was. Interesting. The new google music app is very nice indeed. A pointer towards a GUI redesign for Android perhaps? Haven't seen the new maps app yet. I'm interested in the new dev environment.

Wouldn't use the music service though. And I'm not sure people will pay $600 for an unlocked S4 rather than half the price for an unlocked Nexus 4.

The free stuff looked nice, the paid for stuff looked a bit meh. Not sure that's the order they were hoping for...

So I downloaded Android Studio.

I can't get the damn thing to install under Windows or Linux but it installs and runs fine on Mac OS. Oh the irony.

Quite nice once you get it up and running, although I don't really know enough about Android dev to make much use of it yet. Certainly feels nice than Eclipse anyway (which I've never really got on with for any form of development).

Jon

I'll be trying it out, but not this week. Unfortunately, it's not a high priority right now.

I used Eclipse on Ubuntu in so far as I made the cat app example, lesson 101 on Google's relevant site. I had to follow the (rather excellent) instructions every step. Not intuitive to me at all, plus there were some issues with path names preventing things working on the default install which didn't impress me much.

I then tried App Inventor, which was so easy it was incredible. It may be very simple, but it is capable of creating genuinly useful apps. I made a simple app which shows our server activity on pretty graphs.

I'm quite looking forward to seeing what they have this time. What I really want is something like Visual Studio, which to my mind is the best environment I've ever used.

I've noted a couple of comments on plus which aren't entirely positive. You know who you are, you negative people. Didn't you listen to Larry?
I think I like it because it makes better use of my big screen - less scrolling is usually better.

I may have a play with the "bring your own book" feature on play. It would be nice to have them synced between devices. There's probably a better link, but I came across details here: http://mobilesyrup.com/2013/05/15/googl ... s-devices/

On a quite serious note, does anyone here actually use XMPP? There's quite a lot of discontent amongst the Pidgins, but despite several friends being able to use the network no one actually does...