Has anyone else noticed you can move most of the design elements around and they interact with the balls. Everything except the Android holding the QR sign, the clock itself and the copyright line can be dragged around. The Google IO logo is the only one that you can move, but doesn't interact with the balls.
re 1: I guess its more about "looking amazing", not about usability. I looked at the clock and forgot to look at the date (had to re-open the tab to see when the event was). Looks amazing, though.
re 2: I think that's intentional, because you can drag-and-drop all items on the page. Just drag the title from behind the QR to an empty place on the page.
re 3: Dunno. My arm seems to be a bit slow to actually move many balls simulateously with sufficient FPS.
Initially I thought they have done this using HTML5 but not. A closer look on source code and then each ball is just image like this one http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/static/img/ball-13acfa...., so lot of them and Javascript to animate them. Quite heavy though.
It's missing Lennon (alas), Rube Goldberg, and Earth Day (which'll probably get up eventually), along with some other ones that were simple click-through images.)
Yeah, I was going to mention FF4, but didn't want to start a browser preference war. Also, I tend to not be very impressed with things that only work (or work well) on one modern browser, but not others.
Probably depends on your browser. Stutters on Camino (~Firefox 3.0) when there are lots of balls, runs OK in safari 5, butter smooth in Opera 11.10 and the latest webkit trunk.
This is on a base 2010 macbook upgraded to 8GB RAM.
https://sites.google.com/site/lastcallforio2011/quickfire-su...
This is how I got my Google IO ticket.