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Notes and links from last night's Google I/O review at the New York Web Standards Meetup Group. Thanks to everyone who made it!

Note—There's a "curated" selection of Google I/O videos on this blog tagged io2008.

PowerPoint presentation

Demos/tutorials

• Gears
• Google AJAX Feed API

Advanced Gadget and UI Development Using Google's AJAX APIs. Derek Collison (Google)

The Google AJAX APIs can be used to build sophisticated Gadgets and UI controls for your website. For instance, you can by-pass complex server-side proxies and mash up feeds directly with a few lines of JavaScript using the Feed API. In this session, we'll dive into advanced uses of the raw Feed and Search APIs. We’ll also show you how to use Google's new Language API to broaden the global reach of your web applications.

Participants should be familiar with JavaScript and dynamic Web applications.

Presentation slides (PDF)

Source: YouTube

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group will meet this Thursday (24 July 2008) at theMechanism at 7:00 pm.

Google I/O was a two day developer gathering in San Francisco, 28–28 May 2008, which covered building the next generation of Web applications with Google and open technologies.

I attended and will talk about what I learned there, specifically focusing on Gears, Google App Engine and the Google Ajax APIs. Prior to the meetup, you can read a bit about my experience at theMechanism's blog and watch some of the videos I've gathered here.

24 July 2008 . 7:00 pm
theMechanism
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

RSVP now!

Please contact theMechanism if you'd like to present at the September or October meetup.

Google I/O '08 Keynote by Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer has been with Google for nine years, helping to build Google into one of the world's most popular web services. As the VP of Search and User Experience, her team is behind some of Google's most popular and successful products including core web search, images, news, books, maps, iGoogle, toolbar, desktop and health. This talk is a glimpse from inside the trenches of how Google builds products (including practical insights on how to build the best products), how to prioritize your efforts especially under resource constraints and how to think about strategy.

Source: YouTube

Keynote for Google I/O 2008: Client, Connectivity and the Cloud

Featuring Vic Gundotra, Allen Hurff (MySpace), Steve Horowitz, Kevin Gibbs, Mark Lucovsky, Bruce Johnson, David Glazer, Nat Brown (iLike)

Source: YouTube

I created a tutorial that will step one through how to create a density map with Prototype, the Google Maps API and the HeatMapAPI. The final product, a density map of liquor licenses in Milwaukee, WI, is below. While this map is based on real data, one limitation of the free HeatMapAPI is that only 100 data points can be submitted per call. Since there are approximately 1,300 liquor licenses in Milwaukee, this map isn't even close to accurate!

Creating a map like this takes four simple steps:

1. Getting everything ready
2. Create the Google map
3. Add the data
4. Create the density map

To step one!

Note—HMGoogleOverlay is an undocumented method of the HeatMapAPI. The documentation here is unofficial and unauthorized, and it simply represents my best guess as to what HMGoogleOverlay is.

class HMGoogleOverlay

A HMGoogleOverlay augments the map with a density map image. It implements the GOverlay interface and thus is added to the map using the GMap2.addOverlay() method.

Constructor

Note—HMGoogleOverlay does not have any public methods. It does not support either show() or hide().

There was a cute (well, quirky anyway, and somewhat offensive to the geotagging community) and informative article on Flickr and geotagging in today's New York Times, "pictures, with map and pushpins included." the article defines geotagging, mentions different ways to do it, discusses EXIF headers, and even mentions a product the labs uses and endorses, robogeo. it also questions [and provides several different takes on] the rationale for geotagging.

Read the rest of this entry »