1st day of Google I/O -May 19th

By Robert Kempf
How long have I been looking forward to Google I/O 2010, expecting a firework of new exciting announcements as during last years event. Now the time has come and today was the first day of Google I/O with a Keynote speech which was interesting but missing any groundbreaking news.
The focus was on HTML 5 which is now becoming widely adopted by all major browsers (sadly IE was not beyond them for full support) and that support is not any longer a problem but an area of innovation given that VP8 will be fully open sourced under the WebM project. Now we finally have a web video format which is optimized in terms of performance, footprint and low-bandwidth requirements. The rumours that this will happen after the On2 acquisition by Google has been circling around for a while now.
Also an update on the importance and possibilities with regards to Web applications, the launch of the Chrome App Store, news on Google WAVE and GWT/VMWare integration projects were all part of the Keynote.

All in all very interesting, but a lot of topics and nothing game changing as yet.There have been excellent technical sessions like the one on “Writing Real-Time Games for Android Redux” as well as a couple of very poor ones (won’t state which). A real highlight was seeing such a large community of enthusiastic developers and innovative presentations in the Developer Sandbox area which was MUCH larger than last year.

I really enjoyed Day 1 and met quite a few buddies though I expected a bit more in the way of “surprises”. We heard that Day 2 will be bringing some of these big surprises – looking forward to it ;-)