Blurring device boundaries

Although the main one is replete with the words “Android 2.2” and “Froyo” at the moment, but I cannot be silent. At Gugloconferencing, Vic Gundotra showed something that I, personally applying to myself as a consumer, I consider the most serious revolutionary breakthrough in communication devices since the days of Palm Pilot. And for some reason about it on Habré was not told at all in a few notes about Froyo from the conference, or in the reviews of the reflashed Nexus. Acceleration, flash, hot spots and a beautiful market - it's all great, but it does not change so much the principle of working with the device, like such a thing as the cloud-to-device messaging API .

Have you watched Avatar? Remember, how famously that disheveled black scientist threw the image of Jake's brain from a stationary PC onto his tablet? When I saw this, I thought, “Wow, I want it too.” Tablets and screens there, of course, of insane beauty, but I was most impressed by this lightness 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 surprised at the communication paradigm underlying this system. Android is really a communicator. Not a phone with PC functions, or even just a 3G phone with a good browser. This is a device that uses the Internet in the same way that regular phones use the GSM network. For Android, the global network is a necessary resource for work, which is tied to the work of most applications, and not just the ability to view the page in the browser. Everything - from syncing contacts to complex operations like translating text to another language - uses the Web. Google spawned this ideology many years ago and Google logically embodied it in a mobile device.
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The only link I personally lacked in this paradigm is the ability to simply transfer something from PC to Android. This is not about files and photos, although you can also write a separate article about this. After all, there are various programs like WebSharing or 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 wish. To be able to press Ctrl + C on the PC, tap the icon on the phone and paste this text there; so that you can assign a photo of the contact in the phone by cutting it directly from the photo on the PC; so that you can open a site on your device that is open in my desktop browser; so that you can instantly transfer an image to the phone screen (just a photo or even the output of some program) from the monitor screen as the Avatar scientist did.

In the film, it was, of course, the director's fantasy. And with those mobile operating systems that were before, it remained fantasies. But the ideology of the “permanent connection” of Android simply required to do something in this direction, and on Google I / O 2010 we were shown exactly what gives the foundation for the realization of all the wishes from the paragraph above. All this was 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 device , without the need to perform any connection or synchronization procedures. It simply sends the request with the message and device data to the cloud, and the cloud takes care of delivering the message to that particular device. Once on the android, the message triggers the desired trigger, which catches the receiving program and performs the required action. For a user, this multistep process looks completely unnoticed, and in the absence of network delays, he simply sees how, by pressing a button on the PC, he gets the desired result right on the phone screen.

At the conference, Vic showed two simple examples of what can be done using this API. In the first example, his assistant, Matt, opened Google Maps, set a route around the city, and in Chrome, pressed a small button with a phone icon. A second later, the same place on the map with the same route appeared in the mobile Google Maps on Android! The second example coincided exactly with what I stuttered in the second paragraph - Matt just picked up and opened the site on Android, which was opened on his PC. No unnecessary gestures, no copying to the clipboard, no save-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 was previously 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 boundaries between fixed and mobile devices and between devices in general, all individual devices will turn into a single user information field he will not notice any boundaries.

At the conference, Vic finished the presentation of this feature with the words: "We can't wait for the API". I, frankly, is also very curious.