Windows Mobile Podcasts

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs We are trying an experiment, putting up Code Review in a variety of formats, from text to audio (iTunes) and video. You have probably heard by now, but all of the slides and video of the presentations at Google I/O are now available to watch and read. There are some real gems in there, such as Steve Yegge talking about dynamic languages and server side JavaScript. Just as we come down from I/O, we head off to Google Developer Day events around the world. I am personally off to Brazil and Mexico City, and I am looking forward to meeting the local developers. I gave a tech talk at Yahoo! where I discussed Google Back to Front, covering Gears and App Engine. I shared a simple App Engine example that takes a Gears-enabled Addressbook application that shows how you can store history in a visual way, and ports it to save the data on App Engine. You can watch a code walk through to see it in action. Dick Wall (Google) and James Ward (Adobe) also got together to create an AIR application that talks to App Engine on the back end. The application, called QuickFix, takes a photo and has App Engine run the Picasa "I'm Feeling Lucky" transformation. It is really fun to watch the great applications being built on App Engine already, such as Wordle, which builds "word clouds" from a series of text. One final piece of news on App Engine. Nick Johnson (Google) created a little application in his spare time (read: not official) that is quite useful. smtp2web.com bridges SMTP to HTTP. This means that you can have your App Engine applications accepting email as input via the proxy. smtp2web will send an HTTP request when it gets an email on its doorstep. There has been a lot of focus on the browser this week. Mozilla released Firefox 3, and look like they have set a download record in the process. There was a lot of browser news though, including all of the major vendors. The standards are moving too. HTML 5 has a new working draft, and we are seeing the germination of an Acid4 series of tests. When it comes to Gears, we saw the full release of version 0.3 which included support for the new Firefox 3 browser. It also includes the ability to create desktop shortcuts, new install flow support, progress events, and much more. We also saw more frameworks baking Gears in. Appcelerator uses Gears under the hood to make your existing Appcelerator based application a better user experience. Also, Frizione is a JavaScript development, testing, and deployment environment that also has Gears under the hood. Speaking of testing, Markus Clermont and John Thomas wrote up an introduction to testing Ajax applications, something that is notoriously hard to do. The Geo world is cooking as usual, and you can check out the numerous election mashups as the season continues to blossom. If you fancy some fun on Google Maps, Katsuomi Kobayashi has created a 2D Driving Simulator using the new Flash API. The folks at 360cities also have a great new interface that uses the Flash API, and they also seem to use every other Geo related product. We were fortunate enough to have them come in and sit down with them, and get a bunch of demos. What else? If you care about the social Web, check out Kevin Marks post on how not to be viral. It makes you think long term about your strategy. Kevin Lim posted on the Custom Search API and the new developer guide. This API always surprises me with its richness, and how you can create a fantastic, custom, search experience on your own Web site. Related to that API, we have another new AJAX Search API, Patent Search. I have to admit, I feel sorry for you if you have to use it (due to the content)! And to finish up, Michael Ogawa has created some great visualizations of open source projects over time, such as the history of the Python code base. Check it out below. As always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you would like to see.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs Using iTunes? We had the pleasure to talk to some of the Google App Engine team to discuss the recent launch that Dick uses the tagline as "Your apps, our servers". We get to chat with tech lead on the project Kevin Gibbs, product manager Pete Koomen, and Guido van Rossum. I don't think we need to introduce Guido! The podcast starts out answering why Google App Engine was created, and why Python was chosen as the first language. We then hear about the work that goes into making a language hardened for the platform itself. Of all of the APIs that we expose in the App Engine back-end, we feel that the Database API is probably the most foreign for the majority of developers. Many are used to the relational model for datastores, and our datastore is different. Kevin talks about these differences, and the ramifications that come with a schema-less store. We then delve into the practicalities of having libraries such as SQL Alchemy support GQL which is a functional subset of SQL. What about lock-in? This was one of the big questions that came out of the community when we launched App Engine. You can see how open the team is to other solutions, and how they like seeing work such as AppDrop that shows how you can do this. The choice to make the SDK itself fully open source says a lot. Guido discussed how the Python runtime is indeed the full language, but how some libraries are not there. He talks about the reasons behind the choices, which are mainly related to security. As time goes on more libraries that developers really need will make it into the system, often with equivalent implementations. Although a traditional file system doesn't make sense in the cloud, we could very well see a virtual file system implemented. We go on to discuss a lot more, including:What restrictions are there for serving your applications?What Web frameworks are available?Can you develop Web services as well as Web applications? How about gadget and widget?What kind of traffic can be expect with the free accounts?Can I run these applications on my domain, and integrate with Google Apps?If you want to see more of the team and play with App Engine, come by a hackathon when it get to your neck of the woods, or hear more at Google I/O. You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs Using iTunes? I had the pleasure of taking a trip back to my home land of England to meet up with the team behind the Google Gears for Mobile product. As someone who loves Web development, it is an exciting proposition to be able to use the Web platform to be able to develop applications on the mobile. This release enables you to use the Gears 0.3 APIs on Windows Mobile devices. With this new version, not only do you have access to the Database, LocalServer, and WorkerPool APIs, but you can also create desktop shortcuts. Considering the disconnected nature and latency issues inherent to the mobile networks, these APIs allow you to deliver more responsive applications that can hide some of the problems. Today, we saw the release of a new mobile version of Picasa Web Albums that uses these features. I got to sit down with Joe Walnes, tech lead of the mobile Picasa team. Joe and his team built both the Gears-enabled version of Picasa for the phone as well as the iPhone version that allows you to sit on the Tube and still flip through your family photos. Joe tells us about his experience building the Gears application. I have also put together an audio podcast consisting of interviews with not only Joe, but other members of the Gears team. First, I talk to Charles Wiles, the Product Manager of the Google Gears for Mobile team. He gives us a high level view of the project in general, and this launch in particular. We also discuss the native abilities of Gears on the mobile, widget platforms, and future Gears developments. Second, we hear from two engineers on the project, Dave Burke and Andrei Popescu. They go into detail on the platform, how you architect mobile Web applications, how you develop and debug applications, new APIs such as the Location API, and how Android fits in to the picture. Finally, we hear again from Joe Walnes. I am really excited about the prospect of building rich mobile applications using Web based technology. You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs As soon as Android and the Open Handset Alliance was out in the wild, we were chomping at the bit to talk with some of the people behind the platform to discuss the developer-related information. Using iTunes? We were lucky enough to get some time from Dianne Hackborn and Jason Parks, who have been doing this work for a long time. They used to be at Be, and PalmSource, and you will hear how that experience has come through to Android. In fact, you will see how the Android team has engineers from many other platforms (Linux, Danger, and Windows Mobile). Dick Wall himself is an advocate on Android, and you can hear how excited he is to talk about this! What will you learn on this podcast? Some history behind the projectThe high level architecture of Android. For example, how Linux processes handle the VM and manage security (the VM doesn't handle it)Details on the Dalvik VM and how it is optimized for small devicesThe architecture: From Intents to Views to Permissions and moreHow XML is slow, but the tools convert the XML to a nicer format for youThe tooling and steps for building an application on AndroidHow so many objects have a URL, and how the environment is like a mini-SOA (Services across processes instead of across the network)Thoughts on how you program for small devices, and things to watch out for if you move from the desktopThe control, or lack of control that you have over the application lifecycle"Everything you do drains the battery"The thread story: they exist, you don't have to deal with them if you don't want too, and the UIUsing XMPP for messaging You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe). Want to learn more about Android? Read the book or watch the movie depending on how you are feeling!