Chrome Apps I/O Bytes Video: The Extras
This video was lots of fun to prepare and record. But to be honest, when your main goal is to talk about your teammates’ accomplishments, it’s always going to be fun!
François Beaufort linked to the video on Google+, and in the comments I promised to list all the products and technologies shown or used during production. There is a lot of paperwork involved in getting the permission and rights to explicitly reference other people’s products in a Google-produced video, but there’s nothing wrong with using them in the video, so that’s what I did! Here’s the list.
- Slide deck produced in Google Slides.
- Almost all photos were cropped and color-balanced in Pixlr.
- Slide 4: Google+ Photos Chrome App running on a Dell Chromebook 11. All the backgrounds are the ones included with stock Chrome OS. I selected different ones to provide good contrast for different photos.
- Slide 5: Sparkfun RedBoard, mounted on Adafruit plastic mounting plate, driving a SainSmart 1.8 ST7735R LCD using the Adafruit ST7735 Arduino library, with the sample app altered to say “Hello I/O 2014!” Dell Chromebook 11 in background, running the Serial Monitor Chrome App from Glen Arrowsmith.
- Slide 6: Acer C7 Chromebook. One of the few Chromebooks with a built-in Ethernet port.
- Slide 7: Looks like WeVideo won the carousel spin-off. I took a bunch of pictures for this slide, and because the carousel rotates, many different apps were in the background.
- Slide 8: a fairly standard Chrome App Launcher pane on the Dell Chromebook. Pinned apps include Secure Shell, Caret, Happynine, ScanQR, and Keep. There’s also a not-very-visible icon for Spark, which was the code name for the just-unveiled Chrome Dev Editor. Those are some of the apps I personally use, so that’s why they’re on my shelf!
- Slide 9: Google Now. There’s also an out-of-focus fire pit in the background. It’s in my yard.
- Slide 10: Chromebook Pixel. Also a Nexus 5 phone. If you look very carefully along the right lengthwise side of this phone, you’ll notice the frame is bent. I destroyed that phone while go-karting. But it’s still good as a photo prop.
- Slide 13: The blog post announcing the launch of the Chrome Apps platform.
- Slides 14-22: Code and doc snippets rendered using a slightly customized version of François’s Marmoset Chrome App. I changed the app to move the camera position so that the text appeared in the proper place on the slide, and I changed the color to match the slide theme.
- Slide 23: Chrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool.
- Slide 24: Spark, again.
- Slides 27-28: Same shelf of apps, but also a reference to the very cool Sunrise Calendar Chrome App.
- Slide 30: An Akai MPK mini, which I use when I pretend to produce music.
- Slide 31: My wife’s JayBird BlueBuds X Bluetooth headphones. Continuity flaw! These headphones aren’t BLE - they’re Bluetooth 2.1. I didn’t have any hardware at home that was both genuine BLE and generic-looking enough that it wouldn’t look like a product endorsement, so I chose the headphones as the lesser evil.
- Slide 32: JavaScript Promises on html5rocks.
- Slide 33: A Beaglebone Black.
- Slide 35: Alex Russell’s Service Worker explainer.
- Slide 37: How Many People Are In Space Right Now? One of many amusing websites found on /r/internetisbeautiful.
- Slide 38: Toshiba Chromebook, model CB35. I don’t know whether there’s a difference between the CB30 and CB35.
That’s it for slide content. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the photography. It’s a Canon DSLR with a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens. This lens is tricky to use because the depth of field is very narrow for many closeups, but if you can manage to focus the specific part of the subject you want to highlight, then you get a lot of bokeh for free, whether you like it or not.