Had the chance to get into Google/Globe Developer Workshop earlier.
Interesting talks by Patrick Chanezon on:
HTML 5: Canvas and Video
People say it’s going to kill Flash and Silverlight. The demos we’re impressive but I’m really concerned about actual performance. (Then again, Flash doesn’t do too good sometimes either. I don’t know anything about Silverlight though). Selector syntax on HTML 5 is also great news.
HTML 5: Geolocation API
A lot of development is already leading to this and it’s good to see it’s being added to the spec. Don’t need Gears anymore lol.
Google Web Elements
He did a demo of the Conversation element. This is great and opens up their services to more people (It’s just as easy as cutting and pasting an IFrame snippet). I think a lot of us developers will stick to the JS APIs though because of the flexibility.
OpenSocial
It is good that developers here got to see what’s possible with OAuth. My only thought was how OpenSocial fits in with DSNP, I forgot to ask Patrick about that though. There’s a lot of potential here and if Multiply decides to support it that’s a big step towards local social networking.
Google Friend Connect
Two Words: Comment translation.
One other really really useful API I only found out about today: Static Maps.
Globe did their bit as well talking about their SMS, MMS, LBS and Voice APIs. I’ve always been interested in these but never got any ideas on an app to build using them. Patrick had suggested building a Firefox extension that geolocated users and integrated with the LBS API. Maybe you guys have some suggestions?
After the talks we were able to get a chance to talk with Steph Liu (Developer Technical Program Manager at Google) and got to talking about Wave (she didn’t have any invites at the moment lol) and the more importantly, about the local developer community. Like I’ve discussed with a lot of guys before, everyone seems to have their own silos and there’s no common avenue where the entire community just gets together. You have your Google Guys, your Yahoo guys, Microsoft Guys. Then there’s the freelancers, the “corporate”/”enterprise” guys, the startup guys. These different groups don’t really know each other too well I think and it would be great if we got some suggestions on how to get them together. When the community is tighter around here we’ll be able to bring in more talks from foreign developers and help grow the skillset and level of our local talent.
I’ve started to get active on the Filipino Developer Help Group and that can be a starting point for meeting other guys in the scene. Hope to see (and hopefully talk to) you guys in the next developer events.
