Just as we come down
from I/O, we head off to Google Developer Day events around the world. I am personally off to
Brazil and Mexico City, and I am looking forward to meeting the local developers.
I gave a tech talk at Yahoo! where I discussed Google Back to
Front, covering Gears and App Engine. I shared a simple App Engine example that
takes a Gears-enabled Addressbook application that shows how you can store history in a visual
way, and ports it to save the data on App Engine. You can watch a code walk through to see it in
action.
Dick Wall (Google) and James Ward (Adobe) also got
together to create an AIR application that talks to App Engine on the back end. The
application, called QuickFix,
takes a photo and has App Engine run the Picasa "I'm Feeling Lucky" transformation.
It is really fun to watch the great applications being built on App Engine
already, such as Wordle, which builds "word
clouds" from a series of text.
One final piece of news on App Engine.
Nick Johnson (Google) created a little application in his spare time (read: not official) that
is quite useful. smtp2web.com
bridges SMTP to HTTP. This means that you can have your App Engine applications accepting
email as input via the proxy. smtp2web will send an HTTP request when it gets an email on its
doorstep.
There has been a lot of focus on the browser this week.
Mozilla released Firefox 3, and look like they have set a download record in the process.
There was a lot of browser news though, including all of the
major vendors.
The standards are
moving too. HTML 5 has a new working draft, and we are seeing the germination of an
Acid4 series of tests.
When it comes to Gears, we saw the full release
of version
0.3 which included support for the new Firefox 3 browser. It also includes the
ability to create desktop
shortcuts, new install flow support, progress events, and much more.
We also saw more frameworks baking Gears in. Appcelerator
uses Gears under the hood to make your existing Appcelerator based application a better user
experience. Also, Frizione is a
JavaScript development, testing, and deployment environment that also has Gears under the
hood.
If you fancy some fun on Google Maps,
Katsuomi Kobayashi has created a 2D Driving Simulator
using the new Flash API.
The folks at 360cities also have a great new
interface that uses the Flash API, and they also seem to use every other Geo related product.
We were fortunate enough to have them come in and sit
down with them, and get a bunch of demos.
What else?
If you care about the social Web, check out Kevin Marks post on how not to be
viral. It makes you think long term about your strategy.
Kevin Lim posted on the Custom
Search API and the new developer guide.
This API always surprises me with its richness, and how you can create a fantastic, custom,
search experience on your own Web site.
Related to that API, we have
another new AJAX Search API, Patent
Search. I have to admit, I feel sorry for you if you have to use it (due to the
content)!
And to finish up, Michael Ogawa has created some great
visualizations of open source projects over time, such as the history of the Python code base. Check it out
below.
As always,
thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you
would like to see.
