Join Google at the Game Developers Conference

In the next few weeks, thousands of programmers, designers and publishers will head to San Francisco for the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC). Google will be there in full force, showcasing technologies, distribution platforms and monetization solutions that help game developers create amazing games and reach an audience of hundreds of millions.

We’ve planned two developer days with several exciting talks. On February 28th, we’ll discuss web technologies such as HTML5, WebGL and Native Client, as well as Google’s cloud solutions and YouTube APIs. On March 1st, we’ll switch our focus to Android, with tech talks on audio, graphics, compatibility, the new NDK and the use of App Engine to securely serve application data.

Several Googlers are also speaking at the GDC summits and main conference, presenting topics ranging from mobile monetization to games on smart TVs. For a full list of our talks you can visit www.google.com/events/gdc.

Want even more Google? Visit our booth on the expo floor, where you can meet Google experts, check out the latest Android devices, or just relax in our Google TV lounge. If you stop by, you might even be able to score a pass to Google’s first invitation-only GDC party. We look forward to meeting you in person!

Optimizing your site for TV is now easier

Ever since we launched Google TV last October, we’ve seen web developers optimize their sites for TV with amazing results. However, designing a 10 foot UI and implementing controls optimized for the television is still a foreign concept for most web developers. Understanding that challenge, we’re happy to release new templates and a UI library to make it easy for developers to optimize their sites for TV.

Google TV comes with the Chrome browser that supports familiar technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and Flash. Keeping this in mind, we have created two template designs in HTML5 and Flash that are focused on delivering video content, but equally suitable for photos or other multimedia:

For those developers who prefer to design their own 10 foot UI, we’ve created the Google TV Web UI Library to enable TV friendly controls such as D-pad (up, down, left, right) navigation. To accommodate different web developers needs, the Google TV Web UI Library is provided in 2 different flavors; jQuery based and Closure based. Get started by downloading the library and reading the documentation and tutorials.

Both the templates and the library are available under the Apache 2 license. As always, we love to hear your feedback. Please post comments and questions on the library and templates to our Google TV Web Developer Forum. Happy coding!