Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Aussie developers at Google Wave API Day

The Sydney-based Google team proudly previewed Google Wave to developers at Google I/O at the end of May. We wanted to celebrate this launch with Aussie developers and kickstart a thriving local Wave community, so we held an all day hackathon in the office last Friday. About 80 developers attended the event, representing media companies like Fairfax and Telstra, nearby universities like UNSW and UTS, open-source projects like Jetty, and everything in between. After a day of talks, brainstorming lunches and a good five hours of hacking, 25 developers (or teams, as many came with their colleagues or made new friends) were ready to show off their demos.

The most common types of demos were games - Hangman, Connect 4, Boxes, Competitive Tetris, Werewolf, Zork, "World's Simplest Game", "World's 2nd Simplest Game" - and search - cheap flights, Flickr, OZ TV listings, tours, definitions, acronyms. Several developers experimented with the mobile platform, with two gadgets performing geolocation on the iPhone (one using the browser's geolocation property, the other using the native app capabilities), and a robot proxying Wave requests on the Android. We also saw a few moderating bots (thinking about swearing on Wave? think again!) and a bot that kindly agrees with everything you say (even if you swear!). The crowd favourites, voted on at the end, were Napkin Gadget - a collaborative Flash app for doodling, Syntaxy - a robot that adds syntax highlighting to Python code, and Pong - a gadget demonstrating low latency lag between clients.

All in all, it was a fantastic day. We loved meeting so many developers and seeing your great ideas come to life, and we're looking forward to watching the Australian Wave community grow. For information on upcoming developer events (and more Wave hackathons) in the Sydney area, subscribe to our developer events mailing list. In the meantime, check out this slideshow of photos from the day:

Wave API Day