[guardian-dev] Interesting things learned at Google IO today

[Nathan of Guardian]

Aside from all the Hangout/XMPP hubbub, there was quite a lot of new,
interesting things to dig into that were announced at IO today. After
being inundated with AllGoogleAllDay, I am definitely in the koolaid
drinking mindset right now.

However, it is interesting and useful to think about how we can take
advantage of some of these services without reducing privacy and
security. I also think that as much as Google is closing up well loved
types of open protocols, they are opening up in at a web services/API
layer in a very powerful way.

Okay, so some things...

1) Google Cloud Messaging is now two-way, supporting "upstream" device
to cloud to server messages, using XMPP (funny that!):
https://developer.android.com/google/gcm/ccs.html

I've been thinking for awhile about using GCM to do true push messaging
in Gibberbot, but now that it is two-way, we could build an entire
messaging system on top of this.

2) Google's Play Game services now include a number of interesting
features that are useful for things beyond games including
realtime/reliable and unreliable messaging, both usable in a Messaging
manner and as Sockets. This is based on LibJingle, and will either work
in true p2p manner if possible, or be proxied through Google if
necessary due to firewalls, etc.

Messaging:
https://developers.google.com/games/services/android/multiplayer#exchanging_game_data_between_clients

Sockets:
https://developers.google.com/games/services/android/multiplayer#implementing_socket-based_messaging

This means we can implement OTR and ZRTP using this system... we could
also possibly implment a Tor Pluggable Transport or at least some other
clever proxy system, all masked as "Google Gaming Traffic".


3) Some interesting new Location capabilities, including more efficient
location tracking (1% batter per hour of use), which we need for our
InformaCam work, and GeoFencing, which could be used as part of a panic
button/distress beacon type app.

https://developer.android.com/google/play-services/location.html

4) Volley is new useful framework for apps that make a lot of
interactive REST/JSON requests to a server. Not really related directly
to what we do, but I want to see if it is possible to link our
NetCipher/OnionKit library into this.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/volley

That's all for today, but definitely quite a bit to look into. What was
missing from the day was any news about Android 4.3 and only a few
comments about SDK 18 being available "in a few months"... hmm... looks
like a release schedule slipped a bit!

Oh, and finally, I just installed the new Android Studio developer tool,
and it looks very promising. After being an Eclipse advocate and fanboy
for nearly 10 years, maybe it is time to move on...

+n