Google Developer Day coming to a city near you in 2011

 

As Vic Gundotra announced previously, Google Developer Day (GDD) will be coming to eight cities in 2011. Please save the date, as we prepare to bring our world tour of GDDs to a city near you.

  • September 16: Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • September 19-20: Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • October 10: Moscow, Russia
  • October 18: Prague, Czech Republic
  • November 1: Tokyo, Japan
  • November 8: Sydney, Australia
  • November 13: Tel-Aviv, Israel
  • November 19: Berlin, Germany

Google Developer Days are a chance to learn about our latest developer products and meet the engineers who work on them. As in years past, we will have an application process when registration opens, so stay tuned, as we will continue to bring you updates.

About Browsers and the Web

Late last year, Google released an illustrated online guidebook for everyday users who are curious about how browsers and the web work. In building 20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS with our friends at Fi, we heard from many of you that you’d like to get your hands on the source code. Today, They’re open sourcing all the code for this web book at http://code.google.com/p/20thingsilearned, so that you can use and tinker with the code for your own projects.

20 Things I Learned was celebrated this year as an Official Honoree at the 15th Annual Webby Awards in the categories of Education, Best Visual Design (Function), and Best Practices. For those of you who missed our initial release last year, here’s a quick recap of the APIs behind some of the web book’s popular features:

  • The book uses the HTML5 canvas element to animate some of the illustrations in the book and enhance the experience with transitions between the hard cover and soft pages of the book. The page flips, including all shadows and highlights, are generated procedurally through JavaScript and drawn on canvas. You can read more about the page flips on this HTML5rocks tutorial.
  • The book takes advantage of the Application Cache API so that is can be read offline after a user’s first visit.
  • With the Local Storage API, readers can resume reading where they left off.
  • The History API provides a clutter-free URL structure that can be indexed by search engines.
  • CSS3 features such as web fonts, animations, gradients and shadows are used to enhance the visual appeal of the app.

With this open source release, we’ve also taken the opportunity to translate 20 Things I Learned into 15 languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Tagalog.

We hope that web books like 20 Things I Learned continue to inspire web developers to find compelling ways to bring the power of open web technologies to education. 20 Things I Learned is best experienced in Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser. For those of you who’ve previously read this web book, don’t forget to hit refresh on your browser to see the new language options.

The RHoK community

Two years ago representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, NASA and the World Bank came together to form the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) program. The idea was simple: technology can and should be used for good. RHoK brings together subject matter experts, volunteer software developers and designers to create open source and technology agnostic software solutions that address challenges facing humanity. On June 4-5, 2011 we’ll hold the third Random Hacks of Kindness global event at five U.S. locations and 13 international sites, giving local developer communities the opportunity to collaborate on problems in person.

The RHoK community has already developed some applications focused on crisis response such as I’mOK, a mobile messaging application for disaster response that was used on the ground in Haiti and Chile; and CHASM, a visual tool to map landslide risk currently being piloted by the World Bank in landslide affected areas in the Caribbean. Person Finder, a tool created by Google’s crisis response team to help people find friends and loved ones after a natural disaster, was also refined at RHoK events and effectively deployed in Haiti, Chile and Japan.


We’re inviting all developers, designers and anyone else who wants to help “hack for humanity,” to attend one of the local events on June 4-5. There, you’ll meet other open source developers, work with experts in disaster and climate issues and contribute code to exciting projects that make a difference. If you’re in Northern California, come join us at the Silicon Valley RHoK event at Google headquarters.

And if you’re part of an organization that works in the fields of crisis response or climate change, you can submit a problem definition online, so that developers and volunteers can work on developing technology to address the challenge.

Visit http://www.rhok.org/ for more information and to sign up for your local event, and get set to put your hacking skills to good use.