Google Developer Day 2008: Gears for mobile and the New Geolocation API -- Charles Wiles

• google maps for mobile took a long time to deliver on different platforms
  • 10+ platforms, 100s of builds
  • mobile updates every 6 months, cf. desktop every few weeks
• gears apps can be designed with UI talking only to local database
• background threads then bring in data as it becomes available
• how does Gears compare with HTML5?
  • short term — gears
  • Opera Mobile (WinMo) & Android Q4 2008
  • Expect S60 & BlackBerry in the future
  • long term — HTML5…
• geolocation to within 1km with wifi — enough for a lot of apps
  • two ways to call: one shot + event-based
  • typically takes about 5secs to get a fix

Demos

• Google Search with My Location — Andrei Popescu
  • plugs location and postcode into a mobile version of google local search
• fonefood — Marko Balabanovic
  • towards the beginning of the year looked at operator location
  • doesn’t work outside of home network
  • have to get multiple agreements to work around Europe
  • also looked at open source cell tower databases
  • patchy data
  • need to write a native app to get cell ID
  • now uses Gears Cell ID, works well for restaurant finding
  • shows Google static map with restaurant markers
• rummble — Clive Cox, CTO
  • can choose when to ask for permissions (call getPermission())
  • windows mobile:
  • always call db.close() before a page refresh
  • similarly, lastposition is only useful on a single page
  • google provide a whitelist/blacklist of user agents that support gears
• ITN Offline News — Ave Wrigley, Head of Technology Strategy & Innovation
  • ITN ON is the new media department of ITN
  • also have their own production team: showbiz, lifestyle, etc
  • generally produce content for other people, but are starting to go direct to consumer
  • use case: “flaky mode” — travelling to work with patchy coverage
  • watching videos as well as browsing news
  • also using geolocation for local news & weather
  • configuration interface — choose categories to browse offline
  • settings are on every page of the site
  • also forces that updates are grabbed wherever you are on the site
  • can find out through gears if the device is offline or online
  • don’t have to use XMLHttpRequest
  • not part of public API…
  • site grays out subscription options when offline
  • site warns you how many MB of video you are downloading
  • gears managed store is a bit of a black box — can’t tell how much you’ve downloaded
  • had to implement their own back-end AJAX call to find this out from the server side!
  • 80% of development time has been on platform — Pocket IE is effectively IE4…
  • they had to write specific libraries to cope with the crap browser
  • debugging is very difficult
  • code is in the managed store
  • need to make sure that you’re using the right version
  • developed techniques to get around that — ask offline

Q&A

• when Series 60 or BlackBerry?
  • sometime soon…
• will Google develop a gears translation layer for HTML5 browsers?
  • probably not — HTML5 is the standard, not gears
• will gears integrate with GWT?
  • probably soon