Thanks to a few delays today, I really came to the party late. I was looking forward to seeing Google’s I/O presentations live online at http://www.youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers. I sat down, and started watching about 5 minutes into the presentation.

A presenter was talking about HTML5 – it seems the big part of this presentation is about HTML5. I wonder what Goodies are coming along. First up was some demos of applications that use HTML5 – there was MugTug Darkroom , and Clicker.Tv – and Opera Runnng Video in in their browser. The video tag will now be in the VP8 format.

Next Up, Kevin Lynch from Adobe. I wonder f we’ll see some Apple Hate..?  He starts talking about HTML5 and Dreamweaver. Cool CS5 will show a preview of a site in various form factors. It doesn’t look like this will be mobile browsers, it seems more likely that these are simply just resolution previews. Dreamweaver also has nice feature that does live previews of pages after CSS or code is changed. It seems some of this is going to start overlapping Flash, I wonder if Adobe wants to halt this progress. This last example Kevin showed looked like a Flash animation. Crazy. And support for VP8, great. He’s done.
Now the presenter is talking about finding apps. Could this be headed towards an App Store? Ah, Chrome Web Store. Time to take a look at that. It looks alot like the main screen of the Chrome OS. Do these links favor HTML5 applications written on the web over that of any other tech? Monetization too – apps can be sold through this app store. This is a great idea, but Google really needs to get better at helping people actually discover apps. Apple is crappy at that and Google’s current Android Marketplace is just ok. This could be a real chance for them to make big waves in this market. Chrome App Store seems not to be live n the greater Internet right now.

Now time for the publishers to talk. These guys are dying – now we know they are old.. lol. Sports Illustrated. What on earth are they thinking of with HTML5? This looks so much like Flash. I wonder why they never did it with Flash? Free, he said free. Wow. This is really what the old-style publishers SHOULD be doing. It looks great. I wonder if they are going to pull this off the same way on the iPad (or are they already doing it?). Many have to be thinking that this what an enriched magazine should be. How will they make money off this if it’s free? Re-imagine. RE-make. Open. Searchable. Everywhere. Bold words for a publisher.

No date yet for the Chrome Web Store. Cross-Browser support too? I wonder how apps will be submitted? Will they need to be approved?

Time for Lars and Google Wave. Scoble says Wave is an Abortion. What is Wave going to do? Wave s now open to everyone. Now everyone will see that Wave sucks. Wave is going to be part of Google Apps? he glossed over that one. I personally like the ideas behind Wave. It’s just not easy to use. Wow, back to apps, Wave can be enabled in Google Apps domains for free. Sweet. Lars says come back and take a look. I think it’s totally worth a look. I really could see Wave as a commenting engine on a website or blog. Commenting with an app like Wave would really change the interactiveness of comments. Lars is done.

Now David, talking about how more web apps are at work. Talking about how hard it is to move to the web application. One of the biggest benefits of having apps on the web is the mobility and ability to run the stuff everywhere. David also mentions lock-in (hello Microsoft?). Rapid web application development? Web-App-Delphi? Who understands open? Vmware? Bring out Paul Moritz.

Is Vmware going to be hosting some sort of app development cloud? This is the Google Project Hosting cloud I think. He’s also talking about the Google Web Toolkit and Spring framework. I like that Google wants to spur on the development of these apps. This could have a huge impact on the development of future apps – I can think of many vendors that would like their apps to be mobile/hosted.

Now time to build an expense report application. Wow, he’s building this incredibly fast. I notice he’s also running Ubuntu Linux there. Amazing!

While showing a “Rich  Web Application”, the presenter is explaining how amazing the UI looks – though I wonder if he’ll talk about being unconstrained by the browser and utilizing the keyboard. Most of the best applications lean more heavily on the keyboard and can be full screen. The next demo, Speed Tracer looks pretty indeed. Speed Tracer for the server? Spring Insight. Wow, that is a rally cool performance tool. I’d love to have something like that for a Windows Server. The UI looks slick.

I wonder how all this stacks up to something like Windows Azure? This also seems to lead up to the possible cloud hosting that Google might be announcing? The speed is a huge component here. If a user doesn’t feel responsiveness, the speed was not impressive at all. Looks like an error on the presenters part. Wow, going through 5 million records was fast when connected the wired network. This is not good because the app will need to be as mobile as possible. Given the number of records, it seems quite speedy. I’m not sold on the speed. Would the enterprise use this?

Next is making the app “mobile ready”. Ben and Bruce showing the mobile apps. On the iPad the app looks incredible. Then on Android. Eesh, the speed is not the greatest on Android. The first run-though failed. I think they’re expecting  live updates on the iPad. The network is overloaded? They don’t have a WiFi network allocated just for them?  The widgets are horribly small on Android. Wow it worked. Having the data come up in real-time. It’s pretty flaky, but the app is quite nice – “Aside form the network glitches” – lol.
Next up, flexible deployment. No lock-in. Cloud portability. It looks like you can do this stuff really from anywhere, which is amazing.

Then Kevin Gibbs is up from the Google Apps Engine. Something to “manage” applications? The problems here is that no enterprise will be only Google Apps, but a centrally managed app manager would be cool. Enter, the new Google App Engine for Business. I like what they are doing with this stuff – offering an SLA,support and a real console. This should really go a long way in helping Google appeal to the Enterprise. I think business has had a tough time taking Google seriously. Google now has the apps, the toolkit to make the apps and the marketplace to sell the apps. Incredible how much Google wants to be a part of.
Pricing too, $1000 per app and $8 per user? Just simple, and amazing.

For now, this will conclude my LiveBlog. I look forward to blogging about Google I/O tomorrow morning. I hope to see you then!