I’m at the Google Developer Day 2007, here in Sydney on this chilly winter’s morning.

I’ll update this entry throughout the day. 

Opened by James O’Lauchlan, of The New Inventors on ABC. Being broadcast live on the ‘net. This is the second largest group, with 700 people registered.  

Keynote

• Two new products being launched
• GData feeds into 8 apps – read/write/auth access.
• Heavy focus on Mashups using Google products – Maps, Google Base, Earth, etc
• Announcing Mapplets: Mashups in Google Maps
• Announcing Google Google Gears – allows offline AJAXy sites.

James O’Lauchlan back on …

Creator of Greasemonkey is on… Aaron Boodman

Why Google Gears

• Reliability: 1% of downtime can hurt at the wrong time
• Performance – Local acceleration
• Convenience – not having to find a connection

Gears provides three key bits of functionality:

• Localserver – runs web apps offline
• Database - self explanatory
• Workerpool - runs Javascript “background threads”

10:13AM - Giving code samples

- Demoed how it works - live demo, the presentation itself is the demo - pulled network cable, claps, cheers, etc. Very cool.

Database:

- Parametised SQL, built in SQL Command line

WorkerPool provides, basically background threads in JS - threads execute outside browser (I think), so UI and browser is unaffected.

10:28AM - Google Gears is completely Open Source, very early beta.  Available on IE, Firefox and Opera - on Win, Linux and Mac. http://gears.google.com

10:30AM - James O’Lauchlan back, more jokes.. presenting Dr James McGill.

10:35AM - http://maps.google.com.au/preview - Google Mapplets Preview.

10:40AM - Mapplets are “Gadgets” for Maps - mapplet providers provide gadget, which returns location data and other information for the map points + pop item (eg; hotel availability). Google provides additional map stuff, eg, search nearby.

Can turn on multiple gadgets, so can overlay different data on each other.   Example  given were properties in SanFran, plus crime reports in SanFran.

10:45AM - Mapplets based on iGoogle Gadgets - very small level of modification required to convert.

10:53AM: - Mapplet runs on gmodules.com - not on maps.google.com. (presumably for security reasons)

To enable comms between the map and the mapplet - mapplets run a maps.google.com iframe, then set the hash to your serialised portion. Maps.google.com then deserialises and runs the code.

Key thing however - you can’t run JS Code inside the infoboxes (those popups you get when clicking on a point in gmaps).

11:15AM - Break, cookies, etc

11:50AM - Bo Majewski is on, to talk about Google Maps.

Another real live “the presentation is the demo” thing - no Powerpoint/whatever. This time running in Firefox on a Mac.

12:20PM: Guide tour through Google Maps API - some funny bits. Bo demo’s adding various items to the maps

(Maybe it’s just me, but Bo looks somewhat like Cain, from Command and Conquer)

12:30PM Lunch! Four different “canteens” with different types of food - “American”, Indian, Seafood/Deli, Chinese Stirfry/Noodle Box.  Playing around with some of the mashups that were on show, and a Nintendo Wii (my quick go showed me that I suck at Wii Sports Tennis too).

2:00PM - We’re back,  and learning about Google Gadgets.  It’s been a while since I last looked at the Google Gadgets code - looks interesting.

2:24PM - Now onto Google Gadgets - interesting - I’ve built one, but there’s new functionality which lets you do more.  Also, gadgets can be hosted outside just iGoogle now - other sites, Vista Sidebar, Google Desktop, Mac Widgets, etc.

(Note: These bits were written the next day, due to lack of power on my lappy)

???? - Google Web Toolkit, it was mainly about how you can write Java, which can produce efficient, smart Javascript. Looks like it’s a competitor to ASP.NET AJAX and such.  Allows debugging, etc.

???? - Break - more cookies, fruit, drinks, etc. 

???? -  GData. Kinda dry, but it’s a good way of being able to shift data around in a consistent format. Allows you to pull data from Google Products, fiddle with it, then save changes.   Has built in versioning - if someone tries to modify an older version, it won’t work - needs to happen on the newest version.

???? - KML Overview. - Excellent session by Michael Ashbridge. Google Earth allows a lot more things to be done in the upcoming KML 2.2, adding some web-like functionality (i.e links to places, within Infoboxes and such - lists of locations, etc)

???? - End of the day, Google Dev-Day t-shirts, lots of free imported beers, wines, and stacks of nibblies.

All in all - a very very good day, 99% of it was excellent - the access to Google staffers both in person, and on the IRC chat room was a great idea.