Jump to the tl;dr below for just the updates and links.

This week on The Developer Show, I sneak backstage for a behind-the-scenes chat with Chet Haase and Tor Norbye at the “Android Developers Backstage” podcast studio.

Have a question? Use #AskDevShow to let us know!

tl;dr

Just the updates and links

Project Tango

Project Tango is hosting workshops to help bring indoor location apps to life. You may remember our visit to one of these workshops a couple episodes ago — it was really cool. Follow this link to read more and submit your own idea.

Google Cloud Platform

To help your business grow, we are significantly increasing the size limits of all Google Compute Engine block storage products, including up to 3TB of Local SSD and 64TB of persistent disk per virtual machine. Check out the post for more details.

If you enjoy debating the merits of the Spark and Dataflow programming models, you get excited at the idea of processing terabytes in seconds with zero setup, or simply want to learn how to use the infrastructure that powers Google for your data processing work; this new blog on big data is for you.

Web

Dart 1.14 is now available and contains a number of additions and improvements across our core libraries and tools including progress towards eliminating symbolic links and a new way to access package assets easily and reliably.

The newest Chrome Beta release includes CSS custom properties, background sync with service workers, and new ECMAScript 2015 features. Check out the blog post, and the beta.

Over the last couple weeks we’ve published a bunch of new articles on our web updates page. Check out all the great new content including information on ecma-script proxies, controlling font performance, and more.

AdMob

Invalid activity consists of any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser’s costs or a publisher’s earnings. Learn how you can avoid invalid activity with these quick tips.

Marvin Minsky

“Intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents.”

This and other big ideas came from the work of Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and winner of the Turing Award in nineteen sixty nine. He recently died at the age of 88. For more on Minsky’s work, check out this great article by the New York Times.

Women Techmakers

Women Techmakers is Google’s global program for women in tech and is hosting 14 summits at Google offices and 100 meetups are expected with Google Developer Groups globally to celebrate International Women’s Day in March and April. Apply to attend — they’re gonna be awesome.

Today’s users don’t need to decide on a single way to access their apps, services, and things. Rather, they are presented with a constellation of ways to access including their phone, watch, television, car, and more. We, as developers, need to understand the fundamentals of the platforms involved including some guiding principles for how and what to build.

There are three pillars we should follow while solving user problems and extending our services to new form factors. We must build with interoperability, maintain security and privacy, and employ a natural human interface.

In this post, I’ll go into some detail on each of these pillars and what they mean for you. For even more detail, please check out the great playlist from the Ubiquity Dev Summit. It includes a wide range of great videos on Brillo, Weave, Beacons, Android Wear, Android Auto, Android TV, and Google Cast, showing you how each Google product area fits into the future of IoT.

Interoperability

Historically, engineering teams have built their own solutions to solve common problems. Each creating their own proprietary protocols and further isolating their devices from the rest of the world. With systems, protocols, and IoT schemas that are based on open standards, those same engineering teams no longer have to solve problems that have already been solved. It also means that the devices can be modular and app developers can integrate them into their feature set.

Security and Privacy

Data security, access control, and identity management are fundamental regardless of what technologies are combined to make a product or how users access it. Hardware and software makers should provide security and privacy by default, by building in essential platform features like over-the-air updates. We all need to build user trust at every turn, so they’re confident in the security of their data — and we can do this by providing users with the controls they need to manage their digital identity and their data per sensor, account, product, and home.

Human Interface

We need to make sure that the human interface is based on natural metaphors already familiar to our users like gestures and voice control. Additionally, these interfaces should be available to the user wherever and whenever they want or need access and on whatever device makes the most sense in that context. To this end, there are four principles that can help us understand if we’re hitting the mark.

Effortless

In the long run, users always prefer simplicity and reliability over quantity of features. Whatever problem we solve with our solutions, we must make sure to provide that solution really well and never get in the way of it with less important additions. The user experience should be so simple that it feels effortless.

Contextual

Being contextual is really about being relevant. You’ll want to consider the time, location, and even activity to provide the user with the most useful experience wherever they happen to be.

Immediate

The experience should be so fast, that it should feel immediate. Being contextual can help this, but it’s also about micro-interactions. Remember, you’re not trying to distract and occupy the user. Instead, you’ll want to present just the right information, right away so they can get what they need and get back to their lives.

Extensible

And finally, you want to build your app and experience to be extensible. Where are all the places your user will want to use your service in the future? Build that into your core app as well as the overall experience so the user has your app at hand whenever and wherever it makes sense for them.

Keep the conversation going

Please check out the Ubiquity Dev Summit playlist for more information on these three pillars as well as the platforms and tools that enable them. You can also join us on the Slack community for the event to connect with other developers building in this space and together let’s build beyond the internet of things.

Cross-posted to Medium