What a week for
technology news. I feel like the industry is in overdrive this week as we have large
announcements in mobile (e.g. iPhone SDK, Gears for Mobile), and we get to see a beta of IE 8
for the first time.
I was very happy to see the actual
release of Google Gears for Mobile. I had just been visiting the London office where
I got to chat with the team behind the mobile launch. I enjoyed hearing the story behind the
birth of Gears for mobile, and their thoughts on where mobile development is heading. It seems
like we hear people claiming the breakthrough of the mobile Web every year, but 2008 may
finally be the right time. We are getting the combination of devices that are good enough, and
better networks. The tools that Gears provides seem to almost make more sense in the mobile
world, and I look forward to seeing the community build new Gears to unlock the power of the
mobile devices and put that functionality into the hands of Web hackers.
Listen in to the conversation below:
The mobile release
happened right as Brad Neuberg and myself were doing a mini mid-west tour of the University of
Illinois Urbana/Champaign, and the University of Michigan. It was great to
meet the students and see their views on the Web. Speaking on Gears at the birth of
the Web browser was also a real honour.
Death to
scrap-y
Whenever I see an application that asks for my Google
username and password to scrape contacts I would cry. This isn't what we want users doing, but
I really understand the users are asking for the functionality of mashing up their contact
data, and no-one wants to re-enter it. You can't blame third party applications for offering
the functionality, and now they don't have to do it insecurely. The release of the Google
Contacts API offers an AtomPub based way of consuming your contacts.
There were a couple of
interesting pieces of news in the Maps space. You now have access to a new static
map API that gives you a snapshot image of the map instead of an embed-able
interactive widget.
Pamela Fox also put together a rich Google
Maps API Gallery that answers questions such as: "How do I draw a circle on the
map?" or "How do I create groups of toggle-able markers?"
The open
source side of Google has been busy too. The Summer of Code
2008 has launched, so start thinking of cool projects for the students to get
hacking on!