Google I/O 2012 Recap

Another I/O has come and gone. While I was hoping to post constant updates, as usual the wifi was overwhelmed, keeping us in near radio silence. Now, as the conference winds down and the attendees head home, the few of us still here can sit in the comfy chair lounge and surf the web and write our blogs. Finally! Though I'm sad it's over.

Let me first say that skydiving wasn't the only exciting thing happening here, but watch the video anyway.

Now, the non-extreme-sport stuff.

The improvements to Android with Jelly Bean had everyone talking. Project Butter, improving responsiveness for a smoother interface is very noticeable. Attendees were given a Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 tablet, both with the new Jellybean OS so we could see for ourselves.

Incidentally, ZDNet featured a picture of GDG organizers Aygul and Misha posting with the new Android Jellybean statue. These two were married a year ago and spent part of their honeymoon at I/O 2011. Happy one year anniversary, guys!

Still more...

Google+ Invites! With Party Mode! It was a big hit at the after hours event, as you can see.

Like any new technology, however, there are a few initial kinks to work out, as Will Wheaton discovered. Don't worry, it's a great app and is going to vastly improve your social life :)

Google Compute Engine launched, with an amazing demo, showing a live genome analysis using 10,000 and 600,000 CPU cores. That's some computational power.

What else? Google Docs offline, Chrome for Android and iOS, offline maps for Android, a new Google Drive SDK, a new Maps API, and Google Now. These are just a few highlights. Everything is available online. The session on the future of GWT was very popular, with a long line to get in. There's no way to see it all as an attendee, so most of us will be watching sessions when we get back home.