TTMMHTM: Google delivers, Guardian delivers and some more developer goodies
Friday, May 21st, 2010 at 10:59 amDamn, life is good as a developer right now.
- The Guardian opened their data platform to the world and also built a nice explorer for the information
- Google IO brought us a boatload of goodies:
** We finally have an open video format with WebM which is a container based on Matroska with VP8 as the video and Vorbis for audio. It is backed by Opera, Mozilla and Google amongst other huge players. IE9 says it will support it with a plugin and Safari seems to be supporting it via a Quicktime plugin.
** Google released a library to make it easier to embed web fonts and also host quite a bunch of fonts for easy embedding – preliminary reports by friends of mine state that they look amazing on Mac but very bac on PC - can you verify this?
** Google Latitude now has an API but it also shows some problems
** Google also released BigQuery which is a REST API to analyse data in Google Storage. One of the uses they showed is the Prediction API which does natural language analysis and could become a contender for Open Calais.
** AppEngine got some good updates including a Comet API
** Android got a major update – it now runs the superfast V8 engine, you will have access to accelerometer and camera with a JavaScript API and you can send applications to the phone from computers via the cloud. Makes me want to kill the guy who dropped my Nexus One and hope HTC will be quick in repairing it.
- Divya Manian has a great post pointing out some of the hypocrisy in the web development conference world when it comes to diversity. We complain about not enough female speakers but where are the speakers that are not from English speaking or influenced countries?
- Etsy lets us peek under the hood of their code deployment practices – save the princess
- Jo Walsh has some good info on Using Ordnance Survey Open Data