webqem blog

As developers at webqem we are encouraged to stay abreast of new and upcoming technologies. In May 2009 at Google I/O, their annual developer conference, Google announced Google Wave.

Google Wave is in its early days and it will be some months before it is available to the general public, however Google knows that in order to drive adoption of Wave once it is released it will need the support of third-party developers. With this in mind, Google have built a set of APIs in order allow Wave to be extended.

To help introduce Australian developers to the APIs, Google held a Wave API Developer Day at the Sydney Google office on 19 June 2009, which I attended. The day involved learning about the available APIs and then working with them to build something cool to show off at the end of the day. There was last minute “audience favourite” voting added, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my demo, the Napkin Gadget was voted the favourite!

The Napkin Gadget is an implementation of the idea of a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. With the Napkin Gadget you can do quick freeform sketches in a Wave. The Napkin Gadget is an Adobe Flash based Gadget, implemented using Flex – the only example of a Flash Gadget on the night!

The Gadget has been open sourced at Google Code, and as part of the informal “prize” it is currently the Featured Sample on the Google Wave API Samples Gallery.

An example of the Napkin Gadget embedded in a wave