Google Developer Day 2007 in Sydney

I attended Google Developer Day in Sydney this week. The main page describes the content of the sessions in Sydney. It also links to related video records that can be viewed at YouTube.

The event was well organized. Originally, this was meant to be a 100 people event. However due to its popularity, the event was fully booked within 20 minutes after the registration opened. Later Google decided to change the venue to Australia Technology Park and were able to accommodate all people from the waiting list.

One of the biggest announcements was Google Gears (BETA). It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Google Gears is an open source technology for creating offline web applications. As published in Sydney Morning Herald:

The Gears technology promises to give Google a better platform from which to go after Microsoft's very lucrative Office franchise.

Here is a blog post that will get you started with Gears.

Another announcement of the day was Google's purchase of Panoramio, a website that links millions of photos with the exact location where they were taken.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) got an upgrade as well. GTW 1.4 Release Candidate is a major upgrade to the Google’s open-source framework for writing AJAX web applications in the Java programming language. Read more about its features at ZDNet blog post by Ed Burnette: Google Web Toolkit 1.4: "Have to see it to believe it".

Google Web Toolkit had brought Google's AJAX development out of the dark ages and into the 21st century.

said Lars Rasmussen in his AJAX is painful, painful, painful talk.

Also announced was Google Mashup Editor - experimental product, online application to create mashups. It is currently in beta and access is limited to small number of developers during this testing period.

A great combination of Google's APIs are Google Mapplets. They are mini-applications that you can embed within the Google Maps site. Then they can manipulate the map using Javascript calls that are derived from the Google Maps API. The preview maps site also has Street View, which is very cool and was enabled just few days before Google Dev Day.

When we arrived we received a "speedgeeking" card, which listed six URLs of Google mashups. These six sites were presented live on big screens in the lunch area where everybody had a chance to see the products, talk to the authors and cast one's vote. At the end of the day, Property Guru took the prize home.

And if it was not Google, there would be no search. I was strongly reminded that Google is the company behind the most popular search engine when I saw this card on the tables.

So there you go Google! I blogged and published my photos with GDD07 tag. Go and find me!

Google Maps

These days I hardly find some one who would not know what Google Maps or Google Earth is.

I came across an article How to add a Google Map to any web page in less than 10 minutes. I thought that was pretty cool and decided to try it out. After all, it is quite cool to have my own Google Map on my blog page.

Well it took me well more than 10 minutes. Mostly due to my curiosity. I just had to try some other features that Google Maps API offers and which were not cover in the above mentioned article.

The only "real" problem I had was that I tried to set the latitude and longtitude for Australia and it just did not work. No matter waht I did the map refused to display Australia and defaulted to location (0,0). Reversing the Lat and Long coordinates did the trick.

You can see the result - a fully interactive Google map - on the left side of this page. Notice the links below the map. Click on the to see the maps of Sydney or Melbourne.