Erasing device boundaries

    imageAlthough the main one is full of words “Android 2.2” and “Froyo” at the moment, but I can’t be silent. At a google conference, Vic Gundotra showed something that I, personally applying to myself as a consumer, consider the most serious revolutionary breakthrough in communication devices since the time of the Palm Pilot. And for some reason Habré didn’t say anything about it in several notes about Froyo from the conference, or in reviews of the reflashed Nexus. Acceleration, flash, hot spots and a beautiful market are all great, but it does not change the principle of working with a device as much as a thing like a cloud-to-device messaging API .

    Have you watched Avatar? Remember how famously that disheveled black scientist threw Jake’s brain image from a stationary PC onto his tablet? When I saw this, I thought, "Wow, I want it too." The tablets and screens there, of course, are of insanely beautiful, but I was most impressed by the ease and ease with which there was a complex and multifaceted data exchange between a PC and a mobile device.

    When I first got Android for use, I never ceased to be amazed at the communication paradigm underlying this system. Android is really a communicator. Not a phone with PC features, or even just a 3G phone with a good browser. This is a device that uses the Internet just like regular phones use the GSM network. For Android, the global network is a resource necessary for work, on which the work of most applications is tied, and not just the ability to view pages in a browser. Everything - from synchronizing contacts to complex operations like translating text into another language - uses the Web. Google spawned this ideology many years ago and Google logically embodied it in a mobile device.

    The only link that I personally lacked in this paradigm is the ability to easily transfer something from a PC to Android. It's not about files and photos, although you can also write a separate article about it. After all, there are various programs like WebSharing or the Samba client in ES Explorer. No, we are talking about combining a PC and a mobile device into one information space, a single “clipboard” if you want. So that you can press Ctrl + C on the PC, tap the icon on the phone and paste this text there; so that you can assign a contact photo on the phone by directly cutting it from the photo on your PC; so that you can open the site on the device that is open in my desktop browser; so that you can instantly transfer to the phone screen an image (just a photo or even the output of some program) from the monitor screen,

    In the film, this was, of course, the director’s fantasy. And with those mobile operating systems that were before, this remained a fantasy. But the ideology of “permanent connection” of Android simply required to do something in this direction, and at Google I / O 2010 we were shown exactly what gives the foundation for the implementation of all the wishes from the paragraph above. All this has been made possible thanks to the Cloud-to-device messaging API .

    Using this API, any authorized program, any service can simply perform the required actions directly on the devicewithout having to perform any connection or synchronization procedures. She simply sends a request with a message and device data to the cloud, and the cloud takes care of delivering this message to this particular device. Once on the android, the message calls the desired trigger, which the receiving program catches and performs the required action. For the user, this multi-stage process looks completely invisible, and in the absence of network delays, he simply sees how, by pressing a button on a PC, he gets the desired result directly on the phone screen.

    At the conference, Vick demonstratedtwo simple examples of what can be done using this API. In the first example, his assistant Matt opened Google Maps, set the city route in them and clicked on the small button with the phone icon in Chrome. In a second, the same place on the map with the same route appeared in the mobile Google Maps on Android! The second example just exactly coincided with what I stuttered in the second paragraph - Matt just picked up and opened on Android the site that was open on his PC. No extra gestures, neither copying to the clipboard, nor saving-opening bookmarks, he did not even touch the phone; just press the button in the desktop browser and run to show the page to households.

    And, of course, this is not some kind of built-in function, it is an open and free to use API. This is an amazing opportunity to start doing with mobile devices what used to be simply unthinkable and impossible. As more and more programs and services begin to use the idea of ​​Cloud-to-device messaging, we will observe the blurring of the boundaries between stationary and mobile devices and between devices in general, all individual devices will turn into a single user information field, between which he will not notice any boundaries.

    At the conference, Vic finished presenting this feature with the words: "We can't wait to see what you're going to do with this API." Honestly, I am also very curious.

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