Highlights from Google I/O

Gear on hand.

Let the show begin before a full house.

The stage was dominated by a huge screen.

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google, said 5,000 people are at this year’s Google I/O. In three years, it’s the largest and fastest-selling-out I/O.

Sundar Pachai has even more to say about HTML 5.

Pachai says we need to make sure web applications can do everything that desktop applications can do. The hardest thing to get right is making sure browsers can keep up with web developers.

HTML 5-enabled mobile browsers are outpacing other phone browsers.

Pachai says that video is one of Google’s final frontiers, including their interest in VP8, one of the web’s best codecs.

Folks from Mozilla and Opera both got up on stage and pledged their support for WebM, a truly open codec.

The latest version of Dreamweaver has something called “Multi-Screen Preview”, which lets you see different screen sizes that your website will look in. You can even attach separate stylesheets with each view.

The design/code view has improved a lot, and lets you switch between versions of your site with ease.

Here is how Tweetdeck looks:

Imagine a Google tablet, with this as the home page.

Sports Illustrated is a monster traditional brand that is taking advantage of Google’s support for HTML 5.

Besides taking advantage of the amazing photography and video, SI is building a social magazine experience.

They are creating new types of advertising. A camera ad: imagine a whole catalog of products that you can inspect in your web browser/tablet. You can test out lenses right on the website. Time, Inc. is working with The Wonder Factory to build web apps. Chrome Web Store will have 40 partners at launch, and work perfectly on the Chrome OS browser.

Lars Rasmussen opens Google Wave up for everyone. It’s now part of Google Apps. He says the best application of wave is for companies to do internal communication.

The VMWare guys are on stage showing an open-source tool called Roo. They are building a expense report web application using GWT in less than 200 keystrokes.

Using Google Web Toolkit, you can build interfaces that update each other in real time. Here is an Android updating an iPad.

Google announces App Engine for Business, with professional support.