LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to the Googleplex.
This is an incredible place with lots of great stuff being
worked on every single day.
Before I worked here, I always wondered
what it'd be like to come to the Googleplex,
meet up with a Googler, and have coffee with them,
and just chat about what they do, how they do it,
and why they do it.
And today we're going to do exactly that.
Welcome to this episode of "Coffee With A Googler".
Today I have a very special guest.
You may have seen his face in the Google Play services
videos, or you may have had a t-shirt shot at you
during Google I/O. And this is the man responsible-- Magnus
Hyttsten.
Welcome to Coffee.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Thank you so much.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thanks, so tell
us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Google.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: I've been at Google for over 1 and 1/2 years
now.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: And the last year and three months,
I've been working intensively with Google Play Services.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, cool.
So what is Google Play Services?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: So Google Play Services
is a layer of APIs that sits on top of Android.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: And so for all the applications
that are distributed to the Google Play Store,
this set of APIs are available for the app developers.
LAURENCE MORONEY: All right.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: And these APIs-- they include things
like location, activity recognition, maps,
and many other things.
There are about 12 APIs in this thing.
And you can use these, and they will then
connect to the back end data centers
that Google has to provide these information services.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, cool.
Now we had Francis Mann on the show a few weeks back.
And one of the things that Francis shared with us
was that with the releases of Google Play Services,
we named them after cheeses.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Correct.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right, and I hear
the latest one is Parmesan?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Parmesan, that's correct.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now you've been
working on some great release content for Parmesan.
Can you tell us about that?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Absolutely.
So Parmesan-- obviously being P, we've
released a lot of these things.
On average, we probably release one Google Play Services
version every two months or so-- six to eight weeks.
So there's a lot of functionality
that we're able to pack into this thing,
and that gets distributed to all of the users that are connected
to the Google Play Store.
So it's this really a massive user base that gets this.
Previously, you can only have one wearable
connected to your phone.
So now, you can have any number of wearables connected.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh wow.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: So you can actually run around
with multiple devices and they're all
interacting in the network connected to your device.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow, and you're the hub of this network,
basically.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Haha.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: You can find a lot of interesting services
that can build around that.
And then we have enhancements to Google Fit.
Google Fit is quite a new API, so there
are continuous enhancements all the time to Google Fit.
And we're really excited about that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And with that nice frequent release update
cycle, then bugs get fixed quickly,
new features get rolled in quickly.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So there's lots
of good stuff for developers.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: If you're a developer out developing
applications, just following the enhancements and functionality
that we push into Google Play Services
gives you a very competitive edge
to building new things that may have
been impossible to do before.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now one the things
that you're notorious for is how zanily you
produce this content, right?
So all the release-- all the release videos
have Magnus doing his thing.
We're just going to roll a quick clip of that now.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: We also super excited to announce
that we are releasing Google Play Services 6.5,
enabling you to build better apps!
And what are we do again?
COMPUTER VOICE: Recording "Dev Byte", get to work.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: That's right!
Fitness, however, is all about today,
like how many steps have you taken today?
How many calories have you put in your body today?
How many pushups have you done today?
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's nuts.
How do you come up with all of that?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Well in the beginning,
it was just an idea to keep these things funny
and engaging.
And after a while, we thought, how are we
going to be able to sustain this-- come up with new things
all the time?
And it kind of solved itself, because every single release
has new stuff that you can talk about.
You don't need to invent anything new.
You can just look the things that are in the release,
and then you can find many fun things to do with them.
Like activity recognition-- obviously
Google Fit is a fantastic API-- can go out into nature
and do crazy things, right?
You can just imagine now for Parmesan,
being capable of connecting multiple wearables
to a device like this.
Obviously, it was too tempting to resist, right?
So we had to just dress up all the arms with wearables.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That must have hurt.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Well it took some time to actually mount
them on, because these straps-- they're not long enough to go
around--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Big biceps like yours?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: So we had to use some duct tape
to get that going.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Haha.
That's the dirty little secret, huh?
Now with all those kind of crazy stunts and things
that you do in video, something must have gone wrong somewhere.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Absolutely, there
are things that go wrong beyond just the script.
Obviously, when we're doing these physical things,
with bikes and we're running around, so we have missteps
and you hurt your foot or whatever.
I remember biking and falling off the bike,
because you get really excited.
You want to get this thing going right.
And you make that little extra effort to make it exciting.
And in the process of that, you may
forget your personal security.
So--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Your personal security.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: So we had some incidents with respect to that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I heard something about a wet t-shirt
once.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Oh yeah.
In one of the videos, we had the activity recognition.
We had this Android voice speaking to me, saying,
what am I doing now?
You are running.
And things like that.
At the end of that scene, I was supposed
to come up and look at Googleplex
and be all wet, simulating sweat,
but obviously, we had water.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: The problem is that, that scene did not
go well and we only had one t-shirt.
So we were standing there with a wet T-shirt
and we needed to re-record that scene, right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: So we just had to be run over
to the Google store and buy another T-shirt
and get on it again.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Did you film that scene last,
or did you film it first?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Yeah, it was the last scene,
so that was a good thing.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, so that's not so bad, cool.
Now Google I/O last year, you had a session,
and I hear it was a really highly engaging session,
and you even brought a T-shirt launcher?
Is that right?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: That's right.
We thought, how do we make Google I/O engaging?
How can we actually get the audience
interacting with the speech?
Because you're sitting there and it's hundreds of people down,
and you can't ask specific questions
or engage with individual people.
So we got this idea from a TV show,
and we essentially ordered a T-shirt launcher.
It's sitting down right there in my cabinet now.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Haha, I know where
I'm going when we're done shooting this video.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Under my desk, right, just sitting there.
I haven't been using it since Google I/O last year.
So Google I/O is coming up soon, so I
think it's a good opportunity to, in the next couple of days,
take that thing out and see if it works.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sounds like fun.
So we'll be seeing you at I/O again this year?
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Absolutely, I'll have a lot of fun.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, too.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: OK.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Well thanks so much, Magnus, for coming.
This was a whole lot of fun.
We learned so much.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Thank you.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thanks everybody
for watching this far.
This was Magnus Hyttsten talking about Google Play Services.
We called it Parmesan, but it's also Release 7.3.
So watch out for his video.
And if you have any questions for Magnus or for me,
please leave them in the comments below.
And please also subscribe to the Google Developers YouTube
channel, and you'll see lots of videos like Magnus' release
videos for Google Play Services, as well
as lots of other great stuff.
Thanks again, and thanks again, Magnus.
MAGNUS HYTTSTEN: Thank you.