Is Google Finally Getting That Design Matters? First Look at the 2012 Android Development Kit

By Tim Maly

You may think of Android as an OS for phones and tablets, but Google’s ambitions run deeper. They’re pitching it as a platform that could run on all kinds of devices. To get developers on board with that plan, the company announced an update to the Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK) 2012 at Google I/O.

The ADK allows makers to quickly get up to speed on the platform’s function, but we were much more impressed with how great the form looked, especially when compared to the bare-bones 2011 edition. Has Google finally been bit by the design bug? We spoke with Android Communications’ Gina Scigliano to find out more.

The ADK 2012 comes out of the box as a working alarm clock and audio dock that’s compatible with your Android devices. Why an alarm clock? “Because it’s the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning!” says Scigliano. By making an object that fits into your life, Google hopes that you’ll be more likely to think about it when you’re deciding what to hack up next.

If you do decide to go deeper, Google has made that as easy as possible. The box is held together by magnets — there’s not a screw in sight. Squeeze it in the right place, and it pops open, revealing an Arduino-compatible board attached to an army of sensors.

The board can be detached if you want but with the included abilities to measure light, color, proximity, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, acceleration, and the local magnetic field, to say nothing of the capacitive buttons, an SD card reader, USB, Bluetooth, LEDs and a speaker, there’s plenty to do using the kit.

“We ended up putting in a bunch of sensors without really knowing what we would use them for,” says Scigliano, “hopefully [they] will inspire people to make all kinds of interesting accessories, especially ones that nobody has made before.”

The kit you see here is a limited edition reference design. Only people who made it to Google I/O will get the boxes, but the schematics are available online. “We want people to copy the ADK,” Scigliano says, “both direct copies and heavily modified derivatives.”

The point is to lure makers and designers into giving the platform a try, at all levels of skill. The kit is very user-friendly, even for beginners. It’s designed to be easy to set up and customize out of the box. Interested in going deeper? Google will share all the details, right down to the source code and hardware schematics.

To get hackers fired up, Scigliano offers some possible uses the kit: “a smarter homebrew robot, picosatellite, hotel room alarm, irrigation controller, motorized remote controlled drapes, smart thermostat, egg timer with atmospheric pressure compensation, talking clock, data logging weather station, and did I mention robots? It’ll be really fun to see what people build.”

Google Now

By Sarah Perez

Google Now, the smart personal search assistant announced yesterday at Google I/O, has now come online. Well, the landing page for the service has come online, that is. The new site introduces the key aspects to Google Now, which arrives in Google’s next mobile operating system, Android 4.1 (aka Jelly Bean), including its ability to track flights, keep an eye on traffic and your calendar, check sports scores and weather, see suggested places nearby, and more.

The feature, accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the homescreen has already been referred to as a “Siri killer” by some Android fans because of its ability to not just assist you, but to proactively alert you to new information based on your needs. One example which Google showed off in its demo yesterday was a flight search, which would later pop up a card that appeared with flight alerts and delays as they occurred in real-time. In another example, Google learned what sports teams you liked based on your search history and could then alert you to upcoming games and scores. In another, you could see suggested places to eat or shop as you walked down the street.

However, the biggest piece to Google Now is that the information comes and finds you – not the other way around. This is a key difference between how Siri operates today and what Google is promising. Of course, you as the user are in control of the experience and can enable or disable which cards and alerts you would see. It’s opt-in, which goes a long way to dispel the potential “creepy” factor here. It’s not as if Skynet has just come online. (I think).

The idea for this type of search-without-the-search technology, if you will, has been in development for some time. In 2010, then CEO, now Chairman Eric Schmidt spoke of a “serendipity engine” as the future of Google search. “We want to give you your time back,” Schmidt said at the time. Google Instant was the first step towards that goal, but Google Now takes a giant leap. At the IFA conference in Berlin, Schmidt described the experience that is today’s Google Now, talking about how phones could spout off random facts as you walked around town, or how they could inform you of the weather, understanding the natural language of human speech. He called this idea a new age of “augmented reality,” where computers work for us.

Unfortunately, for the time being, that new age will only be available to a precious few – those who buy or can upgrade their Android-based devices to Jelly Bean. But much of what Google Now offers could be bundled into an Android or even iOS (!) app using the platforms’ push notifications feature. Hopefully that is in the works, too.