Google Developer Day 2008

As you probably have seen I already blogged some pictures from Google Developer Day 2008 in Munich. This year the dev-day took place at ICM (which is the congress center of Munich). According to Google there have been 550 developers (17 of them were female… yeah, right…) attending to 21 sessions.

For me the day started with a pretty damn early flight (I left Tegel at 6.50) so that I arrived round about 9.30 – some time for a little breakfast (which was nice btw) and then the day kicked off with the keynote by Chris DiBona who basically teasered all the session that took place during the day.

I continued with a Geo session by Jens Trapp who basically introduced the Google Maps API (nothing really new over there) and how to implement it. After that he continued with the nicer stuff like Google Maps API for Flash, Static Maps API as well as Google Mapplets API. Some nice stuff – worth having a look.

After a short break Ian Fette presented the Google Chrome browser – obviously nothing really new but hey, nice to have a short overview on that as well. Things like the incognito mode have been discussed as well as the possibility to provide an OpenSearch description document (OSDD file) to enable Google Chrome to include a site in the list of search engines in the browser. If you have not already done it – do it, really not much work but looks nice

After the lunch break (greetings to Markus “Affiliateboy” Kellermann and Kim “Leuk” Engels – was really great hanging out with you guys!) I continued with the session called YouTube API: Build YOUR YouTube (Advanced) by Jean-Laurent Wotton who basically flew through all important things regarding the YouTube API – really impressive! In my opinion the best session of the day, very much information – from basic to very advanced, just nice. Especially the chromeless player as well the AJAX search API for YouTube.

The last session of the day was Android (Advanced) by Mike Jennings which was informative but nothing more… Chris DiBona also presented an Android mobile (the G1 by T-Mobile) live on stage (in his warp-up session), looks interesting but in my opinion it’s going to be a lot of work to compete with Apples iPhone.

Bottom-line: A well organized event (entry was free, by the way), nice & informative sessions as well as good catering – I’ll be back next year!