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Coffee with a Googler Bullet Time with the Cloud Spin Team

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

As part of Google Cloud Platform’s Next roadshow, the team decided to make a demo that anybody could get involved in, and the concept of Google Cloud Spin was born. The idea, influenced by the ”bullet time” scenes from The Matrix was simple -- build a rig of cameras, have them take a number of pictures, and stitch them together into an animated GIF that looks like this:

Coffee with a Googler caught up with the team responsible for this demo to talk about how they built it, what technical challenges they faced, and how they used the cloud to managed the number of camera and create an animated GIF like the one above.

There was so much great information for developers in the exploration of this project, that we’ve split our interview into two episodes. The first, with Ray Tsang, Developer Advocate, who tells us about the ins and outs of setting up a number of phones to take a pictures to create a spin. From their original prototype (having lots of googlers holding up selfie sticks) to their final version (shooting videos that are synchronized on an audio signal, controlled by events in Firebase), it’s a fascinating conversation. In Part Two of our conversation, we will talk about how those videos had the right frame extracted, and the frames assembled into a cloud spin is coming soon!

To learn more about this project, visit the Google Cloud Platform blog.

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How Google Cloud Messaging handles Doze in Android 6 0 Marshmallow

Posted by, Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Android 6.0 Marshmallow introduces a new power saving feature called ‘Doze’. A device enters Doze when the user leaves it unplugged and stationary for a period of time and with the screen off. When this happens, the system defers application activity to save power. It will periodically and briefly resume normal operations, called an idle maintenance window, in order to perform app syncing and other pending operations.

If your app uses Google Cloud Messaging (GCM), you will need to take into account the following behaviors for users whose devices are in Doze.

GCM has two priority types for messages, called high priority and normal priority. When using high priority, GCM attempts to deliver messages immediately, waking a device in Doze, as needed. With Android Marshmallow, nothing changes here.

However, when using normal priority (the default priority), there are a number of different behaviors when the device is in Doze, including:

• The most important change is that messages will be batched for devices in Doze. When the device enters its idle maintenance window, the batch of messages will be received.
• We discard messages whose time_to_live expires while the device is in Doze (including TTL=0).

Despite this, it is recommended that, unless absolutely necessary, you keep your notifications as normal priority ones, as this will minimize battery impact. They will still sync during doze mode as described above, and of course once the device exits Doze.

High priority messages should only be used by applications that need to generate an immediate notification to the end user such as a chat app notification or an incoming phone call.

To learn more about Google Cloud Messaging message priorities, visit the Google Developers site.

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