European Developer Blog

Continuing our discussion in a new place

2015-01-29T17:35:00.002-08:00

Thanks to all of you for reading our updates over the years. To serve our global developer community equally and consistently, we’ve decided to centralize our updates on our Google Developers blog and Google+ page, and we won’t be posting here any longer. Please do join us on the blog and on Google+ to keep up on all the news and tips for developing with Google.

Posted by Emily Wood, Managing Editor, Google Blogs

Announcing the winners of the Dutch Chrome Web Store competition

2011-09-21T03:40:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year we announced the start of the Dutch Chrome Web Store app competition. It finished on August 28th and we have finished judging the entries.

With the recent announcement that the Chrome Web Store is open many more countries across Europe including the Netherlands, we would now like to announce the winners of each of the categories.

Productivity: watkosteentaxi created by Sander Dijkhuis and Kleis Krebbers is a useful little app that lets you know how much a taxi ride in the Netherlands should cost.

Entertainment and Games: Het RGB Spel (The RGB Game) by Q42 is a colour matching game.

Education: EHBO created by Jelle Prins, Wouter Vegter and Sander Hahn. It is an educational app that shows you what to do in case of a medical emergency.

We would like to congratulate each of the winning entries. Each winning entry will receive a Chromebook shortly and should go on to great success in the Chrome Web Store.

Thank you to everyone who entered.

We would like to also thank our judges: Henk Jurriens (Dutch GTUG), Lee Boonstra (eFocus) and Mike Lee (Appsterdam).

Correction: Updating the names of the Productivity winners.

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Advocate

Developer Relations DoES Liverpool

2011-08-01T02:17:00.000-07:00

The primary goal Developer Relations team is to meet and work with developers and businesses and to foster relations within the tech community. Over the past year the majority of my developer advocacy work has been based in and around London (as well as some other rather beautiful European cities).

We want to work where the developers are, especially those outside of London. Starting this week we have a desk at the newly founded DoES Liverpool co-working and maker space based in the heart of Liverpool where I will be working a couple of times a week.

DoES Liverpool

This is just a small first step in our efforts to engage with more developers across the UK and will give us the chance to start working more closely with developers and businesses in the North of England.

We will be running “office hours” where you can come in and talk to us about your projects and how you are integrating with the Google Developer platforms and we will also run and speak at local events.

If you are a business or startup in the North of England and you want to talk about the Google Developer platforms then get in touch with me, if you are a tech event organiser get in touch with me and if you have an awesome app built on the web or with the Google Developer platform get in touch with me.

We are keen to hear your thoughts and suggestions as to how we can better serve the UK developer and tech scene. A great way to get in contact is to leave a comment on G+.

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Advocate

Geo on the Road: The 2011 European Google Geo Developer Roadshow

2011-06-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

Developer Advocate Mano Marks recently stopped by in Europe for a whirlwind tour on the Geo APIs.

I started to write up a description of every event I attended in the last two weeks, but it became a book not a blog post, so I’ll keep it simple and list the events in order:

Paris GTUG

Prague meeting with lead Geo developers

Barcamp Ostrava

Moscow GTUG

Google DevFest Saint Petersburg

WhereCamp EU (Berlin)

Berlin GTUG

Hamburg JavaScript Meetup

Here’s a map:

View European Geo Roadshow 2011 in a larger map

I'm a little proud of that map, I added a beard to the pegman icons. I thought that cool. Anyway...

I’d say it was exciting, but we Googlers get made fun of for over using that word, so I’ll just say it was fantastic. I spent two weeks traveling Europe talking to developers about new stuff in Google Geo. And I found most people had not heard of all the cool stuff we have going on. In particular, I talked about:

Google Fusion Tables

The Places API

Custom Street View

Google Earth Builder

I saw amazing demos, from using barometric pressure in Xoom tablets to determine what floor someone is on, to photo sharing, customer loyalty cards, and tracking cows inside meat factories. I also learned a lot in Russia and the Czech Republic about how people are eagerly anticipating the launch of Map Maker to help deal with data quality issues in those countries. These are all new parts of Google’s Geo platform that most developers hadn’t heard about. And most of those events were Google Technology User Groups or a Google DevFest! So I met with hundreds of developers, and it only encourages me to come back for more. For the many of you I didn’t get to meet, I put all my presentations on-line in my new slides repository.

Here’s a few pictures from the events ...

Barcamp Ostrava:

Including one of our youngest GTUG members playing on the new Samsong Galaxy Tab:

Berlin GTUG members at the awesome c-base site:

Thanks for everyone who was so welcoming and helped me put this on. I’m eagerly anticipating a follow-up trip.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Google Developer Relations

Prague Android Devcamp

2011-06-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post from Michal Šrajer of Inmite, invited by Filip Hracek, Czech-based Developer Advocate .

150 enthusiasts with a small green robot in their pockets, who instead of sun tanning by the lake spend a sunny Saturday in a dark auditorium in order to pick up new skills and knowledge so that they can improve their mobile applications? Yes, that’s exactly what last Saturday looked like as the first Czech conference for Android developers, the Android Devcamp, was held in Prague.

The idea to hold such an event was already around for a long time, but only the Google Developer Day 2010 conference turned out to be the right impulse to actually launch organization efforts. There was a huge amount of interest at GDD 2010 in Android presentations as well as in the exhibition of Android phones, and from discussions with the participants it became more than obvious that many of them would appreciate an event focused on Android developers.

The conference was an excellent opportunity to meet many other developers who are just as enthusiastic about the little green robot as we are at Inmite. We were joined in the organization of the event by the well known Czech blogger and also organizer of many geeky events, Martin Hassman.

Organizing such an event was a big challenge for us and we were surprised by how many things must be arranged and decided. If you ever embark on a similar adventure, here are a few tips on what to keep in mind: selecting a suitable venue, arranging equipment (cameras, visualizer), coordinating with the event partners, preparing the conference microsite (ours is at http://www.adevcamp.cz/), selecting a registration system (of course we developed our own customized solution, but it was a ton of work), arranging catering, preparing the afterparty, and -- above all -- putting together an interesting program and inviting awesome speakers...

For the main set of presentations we invited the leading Czech and Slovak developers: Pavel Petřek from Inmite talked about his experience in the professional development of Android applications acquired during three years of active development, Tomáš Zvěřina took his listeners on a dive into the dark recesses of several unknown Android API’s and Martin Hejna demonstrated during the morning segment what developing in Android NDK looks like. Just before lunch, our colleagues from Vodafone (the conference’s main partner) made a brief presentation and introduced their big competition for Czech developers.

Lunch was followed by Juraj Michálek’s presentation on Air as well as by probably the most eagerly anticipated speech of the day: Martin Adámek’s talk about monetizing Android applications (Martin is one of the most qualified developers to speak on this topic, as his APNdroid application has already been downloaded by more than one million users worldwide). In order to make the program of the full-day conference as attractive as possible, we also decided to include two special segments in the afternoon program in addition to standard presentations:

Lightning talks - during which 6 different speakers made 6 ten-minute presentations, so in quick succession we heard about the automatization of Android builds, the QT framework, developing one’s own activity chooser, writing location based services, the ObjectForms framework as well as about foundations of Android GUI design.

App Contest - competition for the best Android application. Already before the conference developers had the opportunity to enter their applications into the competition. During the event, seven authors had the opportunity to present their applications to other developers in the audience and, in addition to presenting their work, they also always showed something interesting from their developer kitchen. The public then selected David Vávra’s Settle Up application as the very best one, and David was awarded an Android tablet by the Samsung company.

But there were also other interesting things happening at the conference in addition to the presentations. Our friends from the SvetAndroida.cz portal prepared the accompanying program, and they managed -- for example -- to get the Android controlled AR.Drone “quadricopter” (officially not yet supported by Android, but with a little bit of effort it is possible to get the drivers going :) for the event, as well as several attractive Android devices (including the new hot Samsung tablets).

And how did it all turn out? Over 150 developers hungry for new information met in the full auditorium, many interesting discussions were held during the breaks and the community of Czecho-Slovak Android developers was thus perfectly united. The whole event received very positive feedback that has already convinced us now that we will definitely consider organizing another event next year.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Google Developer Relations

Interactivism: Accessibility Hack Weekend in London

2011-05-24T05:03:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post from Naomi Gummer, from the Google UK Policy Team.

Are you free on 17th-18th June 2011? If so, come join us at LBi’s offices in Brick Lane, East London, for a two day brainstorming and open source hackathon that will bring older users together with the best student developers, Googlers, designers and other social innovators in crack teams to hack a better web that overcomes the barriers that stand in the way of older people accessing the web.

Do you have a great website or app idea for older people that you’re keen to hack up?
Are you a student developer who wants to put your skills to the test, and maybe get the chance of some support and cash from Google while you’re at it?
Or would you just like to help out, whether you are a developer, designer, and older person or just interested in getting involved?

It will be an ideal opportunity to gain experience, show off your skills, meet great people and possibly even have your idea taken forward for further development.

Those who attend will work together in (up to 10) teams to develop solutions and at the end of the two days a winning team will be chosen by our panel to win a bunch of Google tech prizes.

Participating students (and ideas) will be eligible to apply to be a part of Google’s summer Interactivism award programme. While the recruitment process is separate from the hack weekend itself, catching the eye of one of the Google team during the two days certainly won’t harm your chances.

Please register your interest and/or submit your idea HERE by 31st May 2011.

We will contact you by 3rd June to let you know whether you have been chosen to join us for Interactivism - Accessibility Hack Weekend on the 17th and 18th June 2011.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Google Developer Relations

Chrome and HTML5 at the New Poland GTUG

2011-04-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

The developer community in Poland has been growing rapidly, and there's been interest in creating a Polish GTUG, and this has now happened. The first GTUG event took place last week, an evening about HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store. This was followed up by a hackathon several days later. We're pleased to say there are now volunteers helping to get the GTUGs started in four cities: Warsaw, Krakow, Poznan, and Wroclaw. If you'd like to take part, please head over to the GTUGPL Google Groupl and sign up.

The GTUG events were organised by local marketing manager Ola Kalinowska and the fledgling GTUG. Chrome Developer Advocate Michael Mahemoff visited Warsaw to participate in the events. He also gave a talk on HTML5 History at the Warsaw University of Technology, and visited the newWarsaw OpenCoffee meetup, and visited some local developers.

HTML5 and Chrome Web Store: Presentation Evening

Similar to events in other cities recently, we combined presentations on HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store with messages from the local developer community.

You'll find slides from Mike's HTML5 and Web Store talks here:
HTML5 slides
Chrome Web Store slides

Dan Franc, who has been instrumental in the Czech GTUG, visited Warsaw and explained the concept of GTUGs and how to take part.

Borys Musielak, founder of film website Filmaster, talked about their experiences developing mobile apps and issues remaining with mobile HTML5.

Michal Budzynski talked about the uplcoming HTML5 Game conference in Warsaw, OnGameStart.

HTML5 and Chrome Web Store: "Hakaton"

The theme for "Hakaton" was "Creative Science", although it was explained that the theme would be interepreted liberally! The objective was to have a live HTML5 app in the Web Store by the end of the day, and the accomplishments were excellent. Judging was not an easy task, given how many ready-for-use apps were developed in the space of just 7 hours hacking.

The winner was a Screen Reader extension, which uses the audio tag to read aloud the current text (backed by a text-to-speech server), and canvas to render an animated speaker as the text is read out. Congratulations Paweł Psztyć and Wojtek Kaliciński!

Second place was a fun nature simulation inspired by the Game Of Life. RGBCreatures lets you drop creatures and food into an ecosystem and see what happens. A great use of HTML5 canvas and audio by Jan K, Tomasz Netczuk, and Adam Sawicki.

Third place was a demonstration of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle disguised as a contest and game. It was not only working and submitted to the store by the time demos took place, but also presented with a polished homepage and surrounding content. A polished effort from Jakub Kucharski, Paweł Szymański, Łukasz Pełszyński, and Bartek Sejwa.

There were many more great presentations on the day. You can see the full list of apps here. A special thanks to the BRAMA group at the Warsaw University of Technology for hosting the event and providing excellent technical support throughout the day.

Congratulations also Michal Budzynski, who won a free ticket to the GeeCon conference in Krakow for being the most helpful participant. Michel shared his HTML5 and graphics knowledge with members from other teams. Thanks to the GeeCon organisers for offering the ticket.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Chrome Developer Relations

Google Apps for Education at Loughborough University

2011-04-08T08:08:00.001-07:00

This is a special guest post from Martin Hamilton, head of Internet Services at Loughborough University. Martin reports on the first Google Apps for Education UK User Group meeting, which Google's Claudio Cherubino took part in, and shares slide decks from the day.

In February 2011 I organized the first Google Apps for Education UK User Group meeting, held at Loughborough University. Find out more about it from http://guug11.lboro.ac.uk or check out #guug11 on Twitter. Many thanks to Claudio and the gang at Google Developer Relations for giving me the opportunity to say a few words here about it.

In my community (UK EDU) Google Apps is a pretty big deal right now - a lot of people are moving to Google as a way of giving their students and faculty a state of the art service for communication and collaboration, whilst also making significant cost savings by comparison with their old in-house systems. A recent survey I carried out of University IT Directors indicated that 50% were either already running Google Apps, or working on a project to put the service into place. So the message for developers is that this is a big potential market - with over 10 million Google Apps for Education users.

We recently collaborated with Google on a Case Study around our own experiences from “Loughborough goes Google”. I’ve pulled out a few highlights from this below:

£250,000 saving on server hardware, cooling and power over refreshing the old in-house email system (five year stats)
Enabling new services – notably 95% uptake of Calendar, 70% uptake for Docs
Retention of the student’s digital identity on graduation, which would have been impossible to resource in-house (alumni get to keep their mail, docs, contacts, etc)
Broader and deeper engagement between IT and the student body (students unanimously chose Google Apps)
Feedback loop as ideas are fed back to Google and actioned

For our own implementation of Google Apps we made extensive use of Google’s APIs to manage our users. We also worked closely with the Google team developing the “multidomain” support for Google Apps, to create our Google for Alumni service.

We heard some similar stories at the guug11 event, and a whole lot more. Here are some personal highlights for me from the day...

Niall Sclater described the Open University’s approach to migrating nearly 200,000 students to Google Apps, and integration between Google and the widely used Moodle software.

Zoe Ross and Mark Allen talked about their work with Google Apps in schools. This is truly inspiring stuff. Just think: today’s four year olds who are happily using Google Docs on their school’s iPads (as at the primary school Mark teaches at) will be tomorrow’s undergraduates! I’m cautiously optimistic that the easy access to developer tools and APIs that Google provides (seen App Inventor for Android?) will result in more kids learning to code.

Tony Hirst and Martin Hawksey described the multifarious ways in which Google Apps can be used and abused for mashup purposes. Did you realise that you could treat Google Docs spreadsheets like a database and execute “SQL” on them? Or that you could import a table from a page of HTML as spreadsheet table cells in Google Docs?

Guug11 mashing up-google_apps

View more presentations from Tony Hirst

Although this wasn’t specifically an event for developers (we had people attending from a wide range of backgrounds and organizations) one of my aims was to raise awareness across the board of the extent to which Google Apps is now a platform in its own right. This is something that I suspect regular Google Apps users mostly only have a hazy awareness of, and even some developers may not fully appreciate.

So what do I mean by platform? For me, this is the combination of:

ATOM based RESTful APIs - e.g. check out the Google Sites API, very nice!
Apps Script - leverage your Javascript expertise to code against most of the Google Apps APIs, with a bunch of helper functions to make your life easier
Google Apps Marketplace - sell your tightly integrated apps (using single sign-on to the Google Apps domain and, for example, Gmail contextual gadgets) via the Google Apps equivalent of the Android Marketplace
App Engine for hosting your code at “Google scale”

I thought Google’s Claudio Cherubino did an excellent job of bringing all this together with his talk (delivered via Google Chat due to rail travel disruption!) on developing for the Google Apps Marketplace, and introducing the Apps Marketplace for Education, which had just launched. Here’s a short video on the Apps Marketplace for Education.

If this all sounds interesting, take a look at the guug11 website sometime to find out more about the event and catch the rest of the talks. You may also be interested in my blog post describing how the guug11 site was constructed.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Google Developer Relations

Chrome and HTML5 in Paris

2011-03-24T07:00:00.001-07:00

Continuing on from our recent trips, Michael Mahemoff recently visited Paris to talk about HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store.

Paris GTUG organised a Chrome Web Store evening at ECE on March 15. Michael gave an overview on HTML5 and later covered the Chrome Web Store.

Google marketing manager's Elsa Salgado announced a new competition for Web Store apps in France.

Kicking off the open mic session, Jeremy Selier and Romain Huet presented Jolicloud, an app on the Chrome Web Store and an web-based operating system.

MFG Labs presented Cinemur, a slick interface for exploring movies, which makes use of CSS3 and local storage for caching.

Rafael Brugier presented GWT Generator, a web app that lets you draw UML and generate GWT code.

Finally, Jonathan Verrecchia explained his Initializr tool. Based on HTML5 Boilerplate, the tool created by Google's Paul Irish, Initializr lets you choose a few options and makes a custom template to get your HTML5 project started.

Special thanks to GTUG organisers, especially Cyprien Decouty, for organising the event.

Michael also visited Paris-based seed accelerator Le Camping, earlier in the day, where he gave a presentation and met with several Paris startups.

Portuguese GTUG Report

2011-03-17T13:28:00.001-07:00

The Portuguese GTUG is a vibrant community of developers from across Portugal. On the 15th of March we held a special GTUG where Paul Kinlan presented the Chrome Web Store and how it will be available to Portuguese Developers and Users.

The event was held right near the top of the beautiful Elevador de Santa Justa in central Lisbon.

After the main presentation, 8 local developers showed everyone what they have been working on in recent months.

Alexandre Carvalho from InvoiceXpress was up first to talk about their app and what they have been working on recently.

Next up was Sérgio Silva, with Cube Anywhere who discussed the Google Apps Market place, the Chrome Web Store and their Native iPhone and iPad application.

Rui Lopes showed everyone Mashmush, a free online music player & service and talked about some of the YouTube API’s.

Filipe Batista and Sergios Santos, demoed their Bundlr app, a content aggregation tool that is in Beta at the moment.

Bruno Pedro talked about Tarpipe and his experiences in the Chrome Web Store.

Alexandre Carvalho showed off ChainReaction an HTML5 Game and Space Dream, a work in progress NodeJS and Websockets MMO.

Up last, Alexandre L. Solleiro demoed his Phown app which aggregates your messages and calls and shows you information that you never knew about on your phone.

A special thanks must go to the Organisers of the GTUG, who turned around a great crowd with only a weeks notice and also to the presenters who gave the event a great feel, and the awesome developers that attended.

Dutch GTUG Report

2011-03-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Dutch GTUG is a strong community of developers in the Netherlands. We were lucky to host the event at the Google office in Amsterdam. A special thanks must go to the Organisers of the GTUG, who turned around a great crowd with only a weeks worth of notice.

We had fun at the event. There was pizza, beer and some great talks. Paul Kinlan guided the audience through the a presentation on the Chrome Web Store and how to submit apps for the store. His presentation ran over a little, but we managed to hear from a couple of awesome lightning talks from some local developers.

The lightning talks were fun, they had a “strict” 5 minute limit, with no slides allowed and a small amount of time for questions and answers. The 5 minute limit was enforced using the Countdown Timer app.

Paul Kinlan was first up, talking about WebIntents and the problems that he is trying to solve.

Sergi Mansilla from Ajax.org demoed their amazing Cloud9 IDE and how you can develop and debug your applications from directly inside your browser.

Peter Thiessen gave a great overview of eBuddy in the Chrome Web Store, and reported a great little soundbite, that users from the Chrome Web Store use the app for 200% longer than users from the site directly.

Marcel from Shuffler.fm gave an awesome demo of their app, and gave some great insight to how the Web store has helped them grow their user base after their initial launch

And finally, Henk Jurriens gave a quick talk about “Game Jam for Teenagers” which is a great project that gets teenagers in Holland developing games on the web.

Thanks to everyone involved for making at an excellent evening.

Something old, something new: Technology meets tradition for the Royal Wedding

2011-03-01T11:43:00.000-08:00

As you may have heard, the UK is gearing up for a very special wedding on April 29, when Prince William and Catherine Middleton will be married in Westminster Abbey in London.

Unlike many previous Royal Weddings, this event will have its own website – and we're honoured that St. James’s Palace has chosen to use Google’s computing infrastructure to power the site.

The site, which just went live at www.officialroyalwedding2011.org, is hosted on Google App Engine, which allows developers easily to build and host their web applications on Google's own computing infrastructure. It's a great way to run apps quickly, more securely, and at scale, which makes it ideal for such an important national occasion. The site will be regularly updated by St. James’s Palace in the run up to the wedding day.

This was a great team effort between Accenture, who built the site, the web design agency Reading Room who led on the design and creative work, and the App Engine team.

We hope it proves to be the perfect marriage of tradition and modernity as we approach the big day.

Dutch GTUG 2nd March 2011 - HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store

2011-02-23T06:27:00.001-08:00

We recently announced that the Netherlands will be one of the countries that will have the Chrome Web Store available with integrated support for Dutch sellers.

On the 2nd of March 2011 starting at 7pm the Dutch GTUG will be holding an event at Google Amsterdam about HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store. Google's Paul Kinlan will show you some cool new stuff in HTML5 and related technologies and talk to you about how you can use the Chrome Web Store to reach new users.

The event will start promptly at 7pm, so arrive a little earlier after 6:30pm. We can’t wait to see you there, we have an Event Information page and a sign-up form. If you want to come Sign Up Now as places are limited.

We'll be talking for an hour or so about HTML5 and the Chrome Web Store, showing you some really cool stuff and answering any questions that you have, followed by lighting talks - so if you have anything you want to demo, now is the chance.

Google Maps and Fusion Tables: A London Trip Report

2011-01-31T08:38:00.000-08:00

Mountain View based Google Developer Advocate Mano Marks has just completed a ten day trip, where he spoke at various events about the Google Maps API and Fusion Tables in London. Mano put together the following roundup of his visit.

I spent the weekend of January 22nd and 23rd at History Hack Day, which Google sponsored. I’m in a one-step program for recovering historians: I have to do something new every day. History Hack Day felt like cheating, doing history and doing something new, but oh well. There were great projects done at history hack day, too many to name all here, but some highlights were a Facebook game to see who could visit the most plaques, a app that would alert you when you were nearby a location that needs a picture in Wikipedia, and a timeline Google map showing the opening of train stations in the UK. I presented an introduction to Fusion Tables and a number of projects used it. I estimate we had about 70 people there, and most of the time was spent coding. Check out some of the projects. Matt Patterson organized it, and he should be encouraged to - and assisted in - organizing more.

On Monday night, I presented on Google Fusion Tables to the Geospatial Specialist Group of BCS. Another great crowd, a mixture of GIS professionals and people just interested in web mapping. I presented a more complete presentation on Fusion Tables. I appreciate the opportunity to present there, thanks to BCS for organizing it.

On Thursday the 27th, I met with most of the researchers at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL. They are doing awesome work there, such as MapTube and SurveyMapper. Check out their site for more details. I happen to follow the Digital Urban blog, which is how I got in touch with them. They have a couple of positions available as lecturers if anyone is interested.

Finally, on Saturday the 29th, the local GTUG hosted a Google Maps API and Fusion Tables codejam at the TechHub. Keir Clarke of Google Maps Mania and I each gave a quick presentation and then for a few hours the 20 participants created maps apps using Fusion Tables. Almost everyone demonstrated their projects at the end of the day, which was an amazing experience. Usually at these kind of events only a few people post. We awarded a winner at the end, to Chris Alexander, who loaded a feed from Datasift into Fusion Tables using the Fusion Tables API and the loaded it on a map.

Thanks to London and the developer community here, it was a great trip and I hope to come back soon.

A European Developers Blog for the Google Developers Community

2010-12-15T08:10:00.000-08:00

We've made a change to how we share developer news for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Despite its name, the EMEA blog has historically focused mostly on Europe, so we've now introduced a new European Developer Blog that more clearly reflects a focus on Google's development-related activities in the European region. We hope you'll return to this blog for European developer news. The Google Arabia Blog and Google Africa Blog also cover Google news outside of Europe, which will include developer content from time to time.

We also have a new Buzz account for the European Developer Community, which we'll be using at events and for ongoing communication with developers about Google's developer activities in Europe: goog.eurodev.

Chrome and HTML5 at Prague Google Developer Day 2010

2010-12-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

Continuing from the previous post, we move on to look at presentations from local Chrome and HTML5 developers at the Moscow Developer Day.

HTML5

Prague-based Maxim Izmailov presented Uppod, an HTML5 video library by Denis Stepkin and himself. This was an opportunity to talk about the rise of HTML5 video, and Max showed us a split-personality video demo: A video that's powered by Flash on the left and HTML5 on the right.

David Grudl, also based in Prague, then covered his PHP Nette framework, which included coverage of Web Forms, an powerful, but somewhat overlooked, feature of HTML5.

Chrome Web Store

We saw an installable web app presentation from Enrique Borras and Joan Serras of Spain-based Fiabee. Please refer to the Munich report, where Fiabee was also demonstrated, for more details.

Chrome Extensions

Local developer Ondra Kepi showed us his Eye Dropper plugin. It's a colour picker tool which allows users to see the colour of any pixel on any web page they are visiting. Ondra went into detail about how he used HTML5 and the extensions mechanism to make Eye Dropper.

Thanks for Watching

This concludes our roundup of the Chrome/HTML5 presentations at the European Google Developer Day events. See you next year!

Chrome and HTML5 at Moscow Google Developer Day 2010

2010-12-13T07:12:00.000-08:00

Continuing from the previous post, we move on to look at presentations from local Chrome and HTML5 developers at the Moscow Developer Day.

HTML5

Opera's Vadeem Makeev, from St. Petersburg, entertained the crowd with a CSS3 progressive enhancement demo. Beginning with a very ordinary looking arrangement of squares on a page, he introduced CSS enhancements one step at a time, ending up with an attractive tea cup display. Gradients, round corners, animations, and eventually a way to theme the tea cup based on the user's language setting!

We also saw a demo of the HTML5-heavy Planata service, from Alexey Shelestenko and Gregory Grigorenko of Moscow. Planata is a time tracking service that takes advantage of WebSockets for real-time updates, storage APIs to store desktop configuration between sessions, drag-and-drop, and many features of CSS3 to enhance the user interface.

Chrome Web Store

The Russian GTUG recently ran a contest to developer installable web apps for the Chrome Web Store. We were fortunate to witness a demo from the winner, Gleb Arestov. His Seesu app lets you search for artists to find news and music from them. Gleb explained the technologies he used and the influence of User Experience (UX) concepts on his design.

We also had a demo from another contestant, Bookmark Stream. Anton Shaleyev, demonstrating on behalf of Dmitry Degtyarev, showed how the app allows users to mark content for reading using the new Chrome Extension context menu capability - users can right click on a link and save it for reading later in the popup menu. When they visit the app later on, they will see all the content they have bookmarked for later reading.

Chrome Extensions

In the extensions session, Yuri Byanov showed us the Goozzy extension. Goozzy is a "sticky note" service allowing users to annotate any website, and share the annotations with others. It takes advantage of Chrome extension content scripts to inject logic and content into web pages the user visits.

Next, we had a presentation from winners of the recent Chrome Hackathon at the Kyiv GTUG, who had travelled from Ukraine for Google Developer Day. Andrew Yasinetskiy and Izzet Mustafayev demonstrated MapEmAll, an extension to convert address listings into maps. The core logic was built and demonstrated in just a few hours at the Kyiv event, and the team has enhanced it since then. The slides are a good insight into the kind of coding used to construct Chrome extensions.

Chrome and HTML5 at Munich Google Developer Day 2010

2010-12-11T07:03:00.000-08:00

We've now wrapped up our European Google Developer Day (GDD) tour, and one of the highlights was the on-stage presence of local and regional developers in the Chrome and HTML5 track. We'd like to thank all the developers who presented their creations at the events and we're going to summarise each of the presentations in a three-part series, one for each venue.

With no further adieu, here are the Chrome and HTML5 demos at GDD Munich.

HTML5

This session highlighted general HTML5 features, many of which work across all the modern web browsers.

The first HTML5 presentation came from Alex Kirk of Vienna, showing Colorillo, a fun multi-user painting app. We got to see a live demo, with audience members painting on the screen while Alex explained the app. His presentation explained the Hookbox technology behind Colorillo.

The second presentation was a never-seen-before technology showcase from Tobias Schneider of Uxebu. Starting with a video element showing a (2-dimensional) Tetris game, Tobias's app uses 540 Canvas elements to transform the pieces into a 3D animation. You can watch a video here.

Chrome Extensions

Earlier this year, the German GTUGs staged a "GTUG Battle" with the ambitious goal of identifying "the very best and most stunning Google Chrome Extension ever". The extensions were judged in three categories - browser action, page action, and innovation - and the Chrome Extensions track in Munich saw presentations from all three winners.

First up, Innovation winner Stefan Grothkopp presented Tabs Plus, a tool that shows you thumbnail images of open tabs and lets you search across them.

Next, we saw Page Action winner Benny Lehejcek and Martin Becker presented PopChrom, a time saving tool that lets you define abbreviations (macros) wherever you type in the browser.

Last but not least, Browser Action winners Stephan Linzner, Mischa M.-Kupriyanov, and Aygul Zagidullina presented Social Media Monitoring, winner of the Browser Action category.

Chrome Web Store

The Chrome Web Store has not yet launched, but this session explained how to write apps for the store, and we showed two in-progress apps due for launch.

Nader Cserny of Berlin demonstrated Compuccino's app, Musweet. The app aggregates music videos, news and other media, and allows users to create custom watchlists so they can follow their favourite artists.

Next, Enrique Borras and Joan Serras from Fiabee showed us the upcoming Fiabee web app. Fiabee is a cloud storage solution and the Fiabee app for Chrome serves as a web based client of this service, moving data in both directions. Data in the cloud, such as images, videos, and audio, can be shown in the browser. And, using the extension mechanism available to packaged web apps for Chrome, data such as images on the page can be uploaded back to the cloud.

Get Your Game on at the HTML5 Game Jam

2010-10-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

Games are a big thing on the web these days. Looking at recent competitions - 10K apart, the JS1k, and Node Knockout - the winners for all three, not to mention many of the runners-up, were games. HTML5 and related technologies are propelling the HTML5 gaming movement and to play our part, we are running an HTML5 Game Jam event this weekend, October 9/10. It will take place in Hilversum, Netherlands, hosted by SPIL Games, and also in San Francisco.

There's more info on The Google Code Blog and we can also announce our keynote speakers: In Hilversum, we'll hear from Tino "Crisp" Zjidel, creator of the original DHTML Lemmings game back in 2004! And in San Francisco, Google's Marcin Wichary will be speaking. Marcin is the creator of the Google Pac-Man logo as well as the HTML5Rocks slide framework.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Chrome Developer Advocate

Announcement: Chrome Webstore Hack Night in London

2010-08-31T02:25:00.000-07:00

The Chrome Webstore launches later this year and will be an open marketplace for web apps. We announced the store at Google I/O back in May, and as of last week, you can now access a developer preview of the store. The store will support free and paid apps, and provides a new way for users to find and interact with your web.

Today we are announcing a hands-on London event where developers can learn more about the Chrome Web Store. Details are as follows:

Date: Thursday, September 16, 2010
Time: Signup and refreshments from 6:30pm, official start 7pm
Venue: TechHub, Ground Floor, 76-80 City Rd, London, EC1Y 2BJ, UK (just by Old St station, take Exit 5)
Who should Attend: Web developers who want to learn more about developing apps for the Chrome Webstore
What to Bring: A laptop, preferably with Google Chrome developer channel already installed

We’ll be covering the following, and it’s hands-on, so get your laptops ready:

Web Store Overview

Making a Hosted Web App

Making a Packaged Web App

HTML5 Application Caching and Client-Side Storage

UI Design for Apps

Posted by: Michael Mahemoff, Developer Advocate

Save the Date for Google Developer Day in Your Country

2010-06-30T06:41:00.000-07:00

Google Developer Days are some of the most exciting and rewarding events the Developer Relations team is involved in. Each GDD offers technical sessions on mobile and web technologies including Android, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine and more. It will also be an opportunity to meet both the Google team and other developers.

This year I'm very pleased to tell you that we're holding Developer Days in Munich, Moscow, and Prague.

Rather than reiterate the details here, I'll simply provide the dates to mark in your calendar and let the local country blogs provide the details:

Nov 9: Munich, Germany
Nov 12: Moscow, Russia
Nov 16: Prague, Czech Republic

Registration is not open yet, but we will let you know when registration opens for each country in the coming months.

Posted by Reto Meier, EMEA Developer Relations Team

We, who are about to hack, salute you

2010-06-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

When we heard that BarCamp London 8 was postponed we worked with the BarCamp team to create a new kind of event within the following constraints:

It had to be set up quickly
People couldn’t stay overnight
It had to incorporate people’s desire to watch the England vs USA World Cup match and Doctor Who
People were flying in who didn’t have a place to stay during the weekend

I’m pleased to say that the community pulled together and we succeeded. The result was 100 people hacking away in the Google London canteen. They may not have been engaged in a battle to the death but there was definitely a gladiatorial undertone to the hacks that were put before the judges. We had judges and API presentations from companies including mFlow, Twitter, Yahoo and GigJunkie who awarded a range of prizes.

There were some amazing hacks including:

BrowserToPhone: An iPhone version of our ChromeToPhone project.
Tariff Finder: A Firefox extension to see how much a foreign product *really* costs to import.
Pianoe: A real-time, multi-user, piano jam session. HTML5 client with NodeJS back-end.
Mapnificent: which shows you how far you can get on a nightbus in London.
Gigamajig: which shows you the nearest musical gigs based on your musical tastes according to last.fm.

The overall winning hack was by Lisa van Gelder with GU-Recipes: which aggregates recipes published by the Guardian newspaper and allows users to browse them by chef or ingredient.

Posted by: Ade Oshineye, Developer Advocate

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/groups/hackcamp/pool/

London Chrome Meetup 16/03/2009

2010-03-03T06:20:00.000-08:00

Google Chrome Extensions have been available only for a relatively short time, but already the uptake by developers and users has been nothing short of amazing. With over 3,000 extensions in the gallery, many of which are developed in the UK, we thought that we should take a road trip to come and meet you!

So, we are coming to London on Tuesday, 16th March 2010 for an event organized with the London GTUG. There, we’ll be covering Google Chrome Extensions, HTML5 and Chromium OS. You’ll also have the opportunity to do a 5 minute demo of your extensions and share with other developers useful tips and tricks you found during your development. We are looking forward to meeting you and seeing all the extensions that you are creating.

To participate all you need to is to fill in the Sign up Form. Make sure to also bookmark the Venue Details page to track up to date information about the event.

We look forward to seeing you there.

If you can’t make it this time, we encourage you to subscribe to our two mailing lists: Chromium-Extensions and Chromium-HTML5 where you can interact with other developers and get feedback and advice for your projects.

Posted by: Paul Kinlan, Developer Programs Engineer

Calling all EMEA Developers!

2009-10-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

As summer winds down and we return to our desks from lounging about in the sun (okay, that's not really true, but we can dream), we on the Developer Team are busy planning the next round of European developer events. The success of these events, of course, relies upon you - the community. So grab a pen and paper (or open whichever form of electronic note-taking you prefer) and take a look at what we have in store ...

First up: off the tails of the Google Developer Days in Asia and Brazil in June, Google Developer Days are returning to Eastern Europe and Russia this November. For those of you in the area or looking for an excuse for taking holiday, registration is still open at the links below. Keep in mind that many of the sessions will be conducted in English or translated on the spot:

Prague, Czech Republic -- November 6
Moscow, Russia -- November 10

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Developer Days, these are day-long events at which attendees learn about Google developer products from the engineering teams who built them. Developers with strong coding experience have the opportunity to delve deeper into our APIs, developer tools and applications, as well as interact with the larger community both within and external to Google.

Some of you have asked why we're holding only two Google Developer Days in EMEA this year. From the start, we've always approached our developer outreach with the goal of supporting the community, from posting information to our Google Code site, to hosting hackathons around the world. Through your feedback and our own observations, we've realised that although large events like Google Developer Day are great fun, smaller, frequent events are a more efficient and sustainable way of fostering relationships with and between local developers.

To that end, we've decided to have our cake and eat it too. In addition to the two Google Developer Days in Prague and Moscow, we're planning to support more and more community events, especially the GTUGs. We hope that these provide regular and useful forums for local developers. Of course, we also encourage anyone around Prague and Moscow - or willing to travel - to register for the Google Developer Days at the links above.

We hope to see many of you at one or more of these upcoming events. As always, stay tuned for more information about these events and other news on this blog!

Posted by Kasia Chmielinski, Google Developer Team

Raw Audio Manipulation in Android

2009-09-01T02:13:00.000-07:00

Version 1.5 of the Android SDK introduced a bunch of cool new features for developers. Though not as glamorous as some APIs, the new audio manipulation classes - AudioTrack and AudioRecord - offer powerful functionality to developers looking to manipulate raw audio.

These classes let you record audio directly from the audio input hardware of the device, and stream PCM audio buffers to the audio hardware for playback. Strong sauce indeed for those of you looking to have more control over audio input and playback.

Enough talk - on to the code. To test out these new APIs I put together a simple Android app that listens to 10 seconds of input from the microphone and then plays it back through the speaker in reverse. Perfect for decoding secret messages in old Beatles albums.

Start with the recording code. It's designed to record the incoming audio to a file on the SD Card that we'll read and playback later. As per the latest security patch, your application requires a uses-permission to record audio.

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECORD_AUDIO"></uses-permission>

The recording code here records a new set of 16bit mono audio at 11025Hz to reverseme.pcm on the SD card.

public void record() {
int frequency = 11025;
int channelConfiguration = AudioFormat.CHANNEL_CONFIGURATION_MONO;
int audioEncoding = AudioFormat.ENCODING_PCM_16BIT;
File file = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getAbsolutePath() + "/reverseme.pcm");

// Delete any previous recording.
if (file.exists())
file.delete();

// Create the new file.
try {
file.createNewFile();
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new IllegalStateException("Failed to create " + file.toString());
}

try {
// Create a DataOuputStream to write the audio data into the saved file.
OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(file);
BufferedOutputStream bos = new BufferedOutputStream(os);
DataOutputStream dos = new DataOutputStream(bos);

// Create a new AudioRecord object to record the audio.
int bufferSize = AudioRecord.getMinBufferSize(frequency, channelConfiguration, audioEncoding);
AudioRecord audioRecord = new AudioRecord(MediaRecorder.AudioSource.MIC,
frequency, channelConfiguration,
audioEncoding, bufferSize);

short[] buffer = new short[bufferSize];
audioRecord.startRecording();

while (isRecording) {
int bufferReadResult = audioRecord.read(buffer, 0, bufferSize);
for (int i = 0; i < bufferReadResult; i++)
dos.writeShort(buffer[i]);
}

audioRecord.stop();
dos.close();

} catch (Throwable t) {
Log.e("AudioRecord","Recording Failed");
}
}

Next we create a playback method that reads the file and plays back the contents in reverse. It's important to set the audio data encoding (here PCM 16 bits), channel, and frequency values to the same settings used in the AudioRecord object. Then again, playing with the playback frequency might be have its own appeal.

public void play() {
// Get the file we want to playback.
File file = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getAbsolutePath() + "/reverseme.pcm");
// Get the length of the audio stored in the file (16 bit so 2 bytes per short)
// and create a short array to store the recorded audio.
int musicLength = (int)(file.length()/2);
short[] music = new short[musicLength];

try {
// Create a DataInputStream to read the audio data back from the saved file.
InputStream is = new FileInputStream(file);
BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(is);
DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(bis);

// Read the file into the music array.
int i = 0;
while (dis.available() > 0) {
music[musicLength-1-i] = dis.readShort();
i++;
}

// Close the input streams.
dis.close();

// Create a new AudioTrack object using the same parameters as the AudioRecord
// object used to create the file.
AudioTrack audioTrack = new AudioTrack(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC,
11025,
AudioFormat.CHANNEL_CONFIGURATION_MONO,
AudioFormat.ENCODING_PCM_16BIT,
musicLength,
AudioTrack.MODE_STREAM);
// Start playback
audioTrack.play();

// Write the music buffer to the AudioTrack object
audioTrack.write(music, 0, musicLength);

} catch (Throwable t) {
Log.e("AudioTrack","Playback Failed");
}
}

Finally, to drive this you need to update your application Activity to call the record and playback methods as appropriate. To keep this example as simple as possible I'm going to record for 10 seconds as soon as the application starts, and playback in reverse as soon as I've finished taking the sample.

To be more useful you'd almost certainly want to perform the playback operation in a Service and on a background thread.

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);

Thread thread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
record();
}
});
thread.start();

try {
wait(10000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {}

isRecording = false;

try {
thread.join();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {}

play();
finish();
}

The AudioTrack and AudioRecord classes offer a lot more functionality than I've demonstrated here. Using the AudioTrack streaming mode you can do processing of incoming audio and playback in near real time, letting you manipulate incoming or outgoing audio and perform signal processing on raw audio on the device.

Tell us how you've used these APIs in your Android apps in the comments!

Posted by: Reto Meier, EMEA Android Developer Advocate, Google UK