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On one hand: Glass is pretty cool hardware, and an improved version of it (relative to the Explorer Edition) would have a ton of potential. On the other hand: G

On one hand: Glass is pretty cool hardware, and an improved version of it (relative to the Explorer Edition) would have a ton of potential. On the other hand: Google screwed Glass' early adopters, myself included, and in more than a year since they withdrew from the market, they've done nothing whatsoever to set things right. (A summary I wrote last year of what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609412)

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Yeah, there was a lot of potential here, and I had a lot of fun with mine at the time, but there was so many missed opportunities here. The hinge on the Enterprise one is a huge improvement.
- wahsd 11y ago
  "So many missed opportunities here" is pretty much Google's motto.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    And yet they put the platform out at all, which is more than can be said for a lot of other companies out there. It's still the most compact headmounted viewer I've seen, and the fact it runs on Android (even modified Android) and not some off-the-wall one-off OS that you'd have to learn the libraries of from scratch is a huge boon. I still tinker with mine, even though it never lived up to the hype of being something you'd wear all the time.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      Yeah, they heavily gimped the potential of it being an Android device though. Since all of the UI was in a closed, proprietary package, there was no meaningful ability to extend the device. Sure, you could flash a ROM on it, but you couldn't build anything with the Glass UI on such. When I bought it, I figured the ROM community would be able to ensure I could do what I wanted with it, but the platform was too locked down for that to ever really happen.
      - fixermark 11y ago
        I never had a problem developing on it [https://github.com/fixermark/nausicaa]; https://github.com/fixermark/nausicaa]; what sort of things were you hoping it would do?
        ocdtrekkie 11y ago
        I would've liked to see a lot of things. Glass's biggest strength was notifications, yet I couldn't even use it for on-call notifications from work because it didn't support any email addresses but Gmail (and nobody ever made a third party mail client). The Wear compatibility basically came after I'd already stopped using it, pretty much. I would've liked to see keyboard input from my little Bluetooth keyboard accepted, even Googlers showed it using that keyboard with an Linux install, but there was no significant work on alternate input methods on stock. A lot of situations, voice was fine, but a lot of times it would've been nice to pull a discreet keypad out of my pocket instead.
    - jimrandomh 11y ago
      Would've been better to have not been Android at all, actually. As it was, they offered up the usual Android APIs, but only as a trap: as the version numbers ticked up, they broke and removed them. I tried to develop that way, and it was one of the most incredibly hostile development experiences I've ever had.
tostitos1979 11y ago
I was also an "explorer", and the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. Did they ever explain why they didn't open source the whole thing after they pulled back? I also expected that some custom ROMs would eventually appear. Not sure why it didn't happen.
mrb 11y ago
How have they "screwed" you? (Genuine question, I don't follow the Glass project much.)
- jdietrich 11y ago
  The software was unusable, they abandoned the product in a broken state and they didn't provide source code. Whether that counts as "screwed" depends on what expectations you consider reasonable.
  - billyhoffman 11y ago
    But did Google ever promise Explorers stable, non-beta software when they signed up? Did they ever promise open access to the code or hardware? I get being upset if expectations aren't met. But I just don't understand what set these expectations to begin with.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - jimrandomh 11y ago
      They did quite a lot of things that set expectations which they failed to meet. First, obviously, a $1500 price tag carries with it an implied level of service. But it's not just that. Early in Glass' life, they swapped all their users' hardware with a new hardware revision. But when their software increased the memory requirements beyond what their deployed hardware had in it, they didn't do a second swap. They didn't communicate the fact that they had made a closed fork of Android (which is Apache licensed); I didn't realize that until I downloaded the source packages they were offering, and discovered that it only contained the kernel (which is GPLv2) and nothing else. They set up an app store, but put restrictions in the SDK license that fell only a tiny bit short of banning app development. (Specifically, it's GPL-incompatible and also bans charging money and advertising). They offered a usable API to develop against, then broke giant pieces of it and never fixed them.
    - chaqke 11y ago

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

Yeah, there was a lot of potential here, and I had a lot of fun with mine at the time, but there was so many missed opportunities here. The hinge on the Enterprise one is a huge improvement.

wahsd 11y ago
"So many missed opportunities here" is pretty much Google's motto.
- fixermark 11y ago
  And yet they put the platform out at all, which is more than can be said for a lot of other companies out there. It's still the most compact headmounted viewer I've seen, and the fact it runs on Android (even modified Android) and not some off-the-wall one-off OS that you'd have to learn the libraries of from scratch is a huge boon. I still tinker with mine, even though it never lived up to the hype of being something you'd wear all the time.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Yeah, they heavily gimped the potential of it being an Android device though. Since all of the UI was in a closed, proprietary package, there was no meaningful ability to extend the device. Sure, you could flash a ROM on it, but you couldn't build anything with the Glass UI on such. When I bought it, I figured the ROM community would be able to ensure I could do what I wanted with it, but the platform was too locked down for that to ever really happen.
    - fixermark 11y ago
      I never had a problem developing on it [https://github.com/fixermark/nausicaa]; https://github.com/fixermark/nausicaa]; what sort of things were you hoping it would do?
      - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
        I would've liked to see a lot of things. Glass's biggest strength was notifications, yet I couldn't even use it for on-call notifications from work because it didn't support any email addresses but Gmail (and nobody ever made a third party mail client). The Wear compatibility basically came after I'd already stopped using it, pretty much. I would've liked to see keyboard input from my little Bluetooth keyboard accepted, even Googlers showed it using that keyboard with an Linux install, but there was no significant work on alternate input methods on stock. A lot of situations, voice was fine, but a lot of times it would've been nice to pull a discreet keypad out of my pocket instead.
  - jimrandomh 11y ago
    Would've been better to have not been Android at all, actually. As it was, they offered up the usual Android APIs, but only as a trap: as the version numbers ticked up, they broke and removed them. I tried to develop that way, and it was one of the most incredibly hostile development experiences I've ever had.

tostitos1979 11y ago

I was also an "explorer", and the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. Did they ever explain why they didn't open source the whole thing after they pulled back? I also expected that some custom ROMs would eventually appear. Not sure why it didn't happen.

mrb 11y ago

How have they "screwed" you? (Genuine question, I don't follow the Glass project much.)

jdietrich 11y ago
The software was unusable, they abandoned the product in a broken state and they didn't provide source code. Whether that counts as "screwed" depends on what expectations you consider reasonable.
- billyhoffman 11y ago
  But did Google ever promise Explorers stable, non-beta software when they signed up? Did they ever promise open access to the code or hardware? I get being upset if expectations aren't met. But I just don't understand what set these expectations to begin with.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jimrandomh 11y ago
    They did quite a lot of things that set expectations which they failed to meet. First, obviously, a $1500 price tag carries with it an implied level of service. But it's not just that. Early in Glass' life, they swapped all their users' hardware with a new hardware revision. But when their software increased the memory requirements beyond what their deployed hardware had in it, they didn't do a second swap. They didn't communicate the fact that they had made a closed fork of Android (which is Apache licensed); I didn't realize that until I downloaded the source packages they were offering, and discovered that it only contained the kernel (which is GPLv2) and nothing else. They set up an app store, but put restrictions in the SDK license that fell only a tiny bit short of banning app development. (Specifically, it's GPL-incompatible and also bans charging money and advertising). They offered a usable API to develop against, then broke giant pieces of it and never fixed them.
  - chaqke 11y ago