I’m at Google’s Developer Day in San Jose. Looks like it’s going to be a great event – just finished the key note which concluded with an appearence by Sergey.
Google are announcing a number of things today (well they’ve announced them already because we’re the last timezone to hold a Dev Day). They, in order of most interesting IMHO, are:
- Google Gears – local storage ajax proxy for offline use
- Google Mashup Editor – looks like Yahoo Pipes, MS PopFly rival play
- Google Mapllets – Widgets that you pull into Google maps that display multiple data sets on GMaps
Google Gears looks particularly exciting because it’s essentially a local storage system that picks up the slack to provide data to your AJAX apps when your computer is offline. Gets plus points for being open source (BSD License) and for having simple javascript API.
I was already to start thinking how it matches up against Adobe Apollo, but then Adobe came out and said they were working with Google to implement this functionality in Apollo too. That’s really significant because the only other player who I was aware doing something in this area was Mozilla – and it turns out they’re not dialed into this too (Google funds a significant part of Firefox’s development).
If you build AJAX apps you need to grok Google Gears. My only fear is what Google do with the data (if anything)… but it’s an open source app so the code is there for inspection. More here.
Will report more.
The London Google Developer Day ran ahead of the US ones, so we got the same keynote speech webcast, only at the end. It was an impressive event and I was duly impressed by gears, mapplets and the mash up editor. Data concerns were raised at a Q&A during one of the maps/mapplets sessions. Maybe I’m just easily won over by free buns and pressies, but I thought the Google folks seemed pretty genuine in their intentions.
What free prezzies did they give you? We only got free tshirt – which is nice but I already have enough Google tshirts for my needs (which is none).
Ooh, that’s a raw deal. We got a tin of thinking putty, a yoyo, a bag of sweeties, a new fangled mouse mat for optical mice, and a USB key along with the t shirt. You really need to get back to London more.
Hmmm I guess that’s what happens when you attend events for 1000+ people. Difficult to supply that many goodies for that many people.
The goodie bag in London was good, and for just completing a set of tasks in the API Workshop, we also got a 3D mouse prize. Looks like I’ll be zooming around Google Earth today…
the muffins were the highlight!
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