Monday, January 31, 2011

GTUG KL in 2010.

Usually you'll get this kind of reporting at the early of the year. But it took me some time to make time to go back & follow up on what has been happening in the year 2010 for the GTUG Kuala Lumpur community.

2010 was the year of the Android. Together with the core team members of CodeAndroid Malaysia, we've been working really hard to promote and build up the developer community for the Android platform. But that is for another blog post. Now, let's have a recap on what happened last year.

6 February 2010.

Our first meetup of the year. At this meetup, we introduced CodeAndroid Malaysia and their line of Android applications developed by the core team members. CodeAndroid Malaysia objectives for 2010 is pull in more interest in Android applications development. We've said that we will put more effort in growing awareness and most importantly knowledge in Android development. Here's what we've reached so far in 2010:

20 March 2010.

Chrome extensions mini hackathon. Presented a tutorial on how to create an extension for the Google Chrome browser. What did we get? A Google Chrome extension for DevFest developed by Leonard Lee, a GTUG KL community member. Wuhoo!

13 June 2010.

Our first Office Hours session with Wesley Chun, a visiting Googler from Mountain View, California. A number of Python developers from Malaysia attended this event and Wesley was more than glad to bounce questions & answers with them. We're looking to invite more Googlers to come to Kuala Lumpur and connect with the local community!

16 July 2010.

Google DevFest Kuala Lumpur. The mother of all GTUG KL meetups (as tweeted by our friend, @sweemeng). Over 300 developers attended this event and was awed by presentations from the Google Developer Relations team. Daniels Lee on Google Maps, Google Places and how to find coffee; the dynamic duo Timothy Jordan & Bob Aman on Google Buzz and the Open Web; Patrick Chanezon on Google Predictions API & App Engine. We took this chance to highlight some of the best work from Malaysia as well.

Reza from Terato Tech presented Undies, an iPhone application to find out what kind of underwear people around you are wearing; Leonard Lee shared his experience about developing the Chrome extension for DevFest 2010.

18 September 2010.

A 1 hour tutorial on how to prepare existing or new web applications (and websites in many regards) for the upcoming Google Chrome Web Store. Showcased in this meetup was a webapp called TimeToBuka. TimeToBuka is a simple webapp for Muslims in Malaysia & Singapore to check for breaking fast times. It was built on App Engine using Google Spreadsheet as the database & a little bit of jQuery to make it work. It's HTML(5) compliant and is available on the Chrome Web Store. At Barcamp Bangkok this year, I presented an overview on how I used different technologies to build this webapp in 4 days.

16 October 2010.

Swee Meng, GTUG KL community member, organised a meetup at HackerspaceKL with Graham Dumpleton, the creator of mod_wsgi for Python.

12 October 2010.

Timothy Jordan was in town again and wanted to meetup with developers. Instead, he got a classroom of students and lecturers from Multimedia University in Cyberjaya, conversing with him about the Open Web. This meetup was organised by Ikhwan, a GTUG KL community member.

That was last year. So what's coming for this year? This year will be a continuing focus on Android. CodeAndroid Malaysia has gone places last year and will continue to do so this year. We're also planning to have more mini (and large) scale hackathons and showcase applications developed using Google technologies. And one lesson that we've learned is to organize a meetup at least a month before. No more last minute planning!

If you have suggestions on what kind of Google technologies you would like to learn, which Googlers you want to meet, email your suggestions to nazrul at gtugs dot org.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

A honeycombed Google Code periodic table

Google Code released this periodic view of all the available developer APIs from Google. It's a really cool visual representation in a form that's familiar to geeks. When you hover over the Android (or Mobile) icon, you'll get to see the related APIs in the same category.

Got this tip from @ropu, a software engineer from Argentina. He was a presenter at the first Google DevFest in Singapore a few years back.

Honeycomb Preview SDK released.

In other news, the Android team has released a preview SDK for Honeycomb! Hurrah! Now developers can start building (or porting) new or existing apps for the tablet format. Apparently, any applications developed from this preview release won't be able to make it to the Market just yet. However, developers will have the chance to prepare themselves and their apps when it's officially released. You can start reading about the new SDK and fire up your Eclipse to download that honey. It's the beez knees!