TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hi, my name is Timothy Jordan, and I'm a
developer advocate on the Glass team here at Google.
And today I'm joined by Jeff Eddings of the Turner Emerging
Technology group.
Jeff, welcome.
JEFF EDDINGS: Hello, thanks.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: How are you doing?
JEFF EDDINGS: I'm great, I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So you are the man behind the CNN Glassware.
JEFF EDDINGS: That's right.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Why don't you tell us a little bit about the
Glassware and what users seem to think of it.
JEFF EDDINGS: Sure.
When we first heard about Glass, we thought right away
that we needed to have CNN news alerts on there.
It was a natural fit.
And so, when we first started working together, we were
super excited about doing it, and our users seem
to love it as well.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Now, what I love about the Glassware is
that, I find during the day, during my business day, I'm
really, really busy.
But at the end of the night, I'm often hanging out with
family and friends, or if I'm reading, I'm reading fiction.
I don't usually sit down and read the newspaper.
But I like getting alerts throughout the day.
I like staying current on world events.
And I find with CNN, it's really easy to do that.
I can get the cover card and quickly glance at it, or I can
view the video while I'm walking between meetings, and
I still sort of know what's going on in the world.
But I didn't have to take a large chunk out of my day.
JEFF EDDINGS: That's right.
And news some of the most perishable content that exists
out there today.
The older it is, the less relevant, the less
important it is.
And so for us to be able to get news out to users when
it's happening, right after it happens,
that's incredibly valuable.
And so for us, like I said, this was a really exciting
project for us.
We're very keen on understanding how these kinds
of glanceable technologies work and how people consume
news differently with those.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's awesome.
And the videos work really well on Glass.
JEFF EDDINGS: They do.
They do.
We were a little bit reluctant--
or not reluctant, hesitant-- about going into this, because
we were afraid that the video wouldn't quite look right.
We were very pleasantly surprised.
They actually look awesome.
We've been really pleased by it.
And our users have told us the same thing.
They've told us the videos look really, really good, and
that's what they really like about the Glassware.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
OK, so today, we're going to talk about two new things that
came out with XE8 for the platform on the Mirror API.
The first was the video player that we've updated, so it has
controls for play, pause, rewind, fast forward.
And HTML pagination.
Let's start with the video player.
JEFF EDDINGS: Sure.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Kind of got that one for free, right?
JEFF EDDINGS: We did.
It's the best kind of feature, is when we don't have to do
anything at all to improve it.
So it's been great.
One of the things that our users were saying,
can I pause the video?
Can I rewind or fast forward?
And we sort of shrugged.
But now, we get to say, very confidently,
yes, that is in there.
It works great, and we're thrilled that you
guys put it in there.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Now the next one, HTML pagination.
I'm going to talk through it with some slides in a moment.
But I think the key thing here is that you were getting rich
content with multiple screens of information on Glass using
bundling before.
But it wasn't necessarily the best way to use bundling, and
it also tripled your cost for insertions per user.
But now with HTML pagination, it's [? totally ?]
different.
JEFF EDDINGS: Absolutely.
This is a great feature for us.
From our perspective, we were able to rip large amounts of
code out and simplify what we were doing as well.
As you said, the cost went down, and it just made things
much more easy to maintain.
It's a very smart way to present that data and send it
to you guys without having to manage multiple cards-- and
what if one failed, but another one didn't-- and so,
it's been actually a really tremendous feature for us.
We also have content in there that--
we were troubled--
we didn't know how to display to the end user.
Do we put it on multiple cards?
Do we reduce the font size?
Now with the new pagination feature, we're able to just
put it in there, and, as long as we have the right tags in
there, set it and forget it.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Very cool.
So let's take a look at some slides here.
I just want to show everybody out there a flow.
This is a single CNN timeline card.
You'll notice there is a cover card up in
the upper left there.
And if you tap into it, you get your menu
of options, as usual.
But here, you'll see Play, Read more, and Read aloud.
Play will go straight to the video.
If you swipe forward to Read more, that's the HTML minus
the cover card.
And that'll auto paginate, depending on the size of the
text in that article.
And then Read aloud will, of course, read the speakable
text to the user.
And now in code--
and this is always the coolest part, because these features
are so easy to implement on the Mirror API.
Here's the JSON.
And it's as you would expect.
You got HTMLs, speakableText, and the menuItems.
All you need to specify for the menuItems is READ_ALOUD,
because Play you get, since there's a video attached.
And then the Read more you get, because there's multiple
pages in the HTML.
The HTML looks like this.
It's done with block level tags.
So you'll notice there's two article tags there.
The first one is cover-only, so that's only going to show
up on the cover.
And then the second one, you'll notice, it's class is
auto-paginate.
So you can have many article tags and that would be a
deliberate separate page.
But if you set the auto-paginate on an article
tag, then the text within there will grow to the number
of pages it needs to contain it.
And that's it.
So a video player, HTML pagination, and then hopefully
we're going to keep working on this, and see some more stuff.
JEFF EDDINGS: Absolutely.
We're really excited about some of the things that we're
working on right now to extend the CNN Glassware.
Right now, we're sending news out to the individual
subscribers.
And they get to read that throughout the day.
But we think there's a real opportunity for actually
gathering news using the Glass device.
Those are some exciting days ahead for us, and hopefully by
the end of the year, we'll have something great to show.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Well, we're really looking forward to that.
JEFF EDDINGS: Yeah, thanks.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thanks for coming by, Jeff.
JEFF EDDINGS: Thank you.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Everyone, we'll see you later.