Join the League of Extraordinary #H4ckers at SXSW!

Heading to Austin, TX for South by Southwest (SXSW) this week? Good — so are we. And we’re planning what I hope will be a an event for the ages!

The festivities start at 1pm on March 13 with the opening of The League of Extraordinary Hackers followed by a very special SuperHappyDevHouse at 7pm at the Speakeasy on 412 Congress Ave in Austin.

Business by day, hacking by night

From 1pm to 6pm, we’ll be hosting a series of 15-minute rapid-fire API briefings focused on Google’s latest developer offerings including: Android, Chrome, HTML5, Blogger, Google TV, Google Maps, App Engine, YouTube, Web Fonts, Cellbots, and Fusion Tables. Immediately following each talk, the speakers will be holding court during office hours in Speakeasy’s open air rooftop lounge.

At the same time, we’ll be demoing Google TV and the YouTube Leanback experience in the Leanback Lounge on the second floor. And if you’re just looking for a place to chill, meet other Google developers, or grab free WiFi and juice for your devices, we’ve got you covered in that department as well.

Yes, this is one of our drink cards.

At 7pm, we’ll welcome the SuperHappyDevHouse community for a night of hacking, lightning talks, a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® sumobot competition (!), steampunkery, and Google TV and Xbox 360® Kinect™ tomfoolery. And if a soundtrack co-curated on Rdio weren’t enough to make your booty move, then come get loosened up with League-inspired elixirs concocted by Google’s own mixologist, Daniel “Gin not Vodka” Nadasi!

This event promises to be one-of-a-kind and a rare respite from the pure partying events at SXSW. Of course it wouldn’t be possible with a great cast of sponsors including Google, Windows Live, The LEGO Group, NPR, Sencha, Red Bull Creation, Twilio, and Rdio.

Get on the list and invite your friends

Since we’re managing attendees separately, the most important links you need are the ones that get you in (and get you free drinks!):

  1. RSVP for The League of Extraordinary Hackers
  2. RSVP for SHDH@SXSW

You can also find these events elsewhere:

  1. The League of Extraordinary Hackers is on Facebook, Plancast, and Lanyrd
  2. SHDH@SXSW is on Facebook, Plancast, and Lanyrd

YouTube Captions Uploader Web App

Captions can greatly enhance the experience of viewing a YouTube video, and the YouTube API has offered developers ways to upload and retrieve caption data in authorized requests for a while now. However, the various YouTube API client libraries don’t natively support interacting with captions at this time, and writing your own code for uploading or retrieving captions can be challenging.

With that in mind, we’re happy to announce the YouTube Captions Uploader open source project on Google Code, which provides real-world code for uploading captions to YouTube. The code is written for the Java App Engine environment, and it uses some nifty new App Engine features like the Channel API, the Blobstore Service, and Task Queues. And even if you’re not an App Engine developer, we hope that the code that interacts with the YouTube API’s captions service will provide a good starting point for writing your own code.

In addition to open sourcing the code for this project, we’re also running the code itself on a public App Engine instance, http://yt-captions-uploader.appspot.com/. So, even if you’re not a developer, you can still use the application to upload captions for videos in your YouTube account.

Please share your comments or feedback via the project’s issue tracker. We hope that you find it useful both as a standalone web application and as a starting point for writing your own code!

A Chrome Extension for YouTube Activity Feeds

Slave Jovanovski, an engineer at YouTube, has put together a Google Chrome extension that should be of interest to the YouTube API community. It’s called YouTube Feed, and after installing and authenticating with your YouTube account, it automatically will fetch your YouTube social activity stream (both subscriptions and friends’ actions) while you use Google Chrome. When a new event, like a YouTube friend uploading or commenting on a video, takes place, the extension will notify you and provide details on the activity, as well as links to view the actual video. You have control over which types of activities you’d like to be notified about, as well as how frequently you’d like the extension to check for updates.

While you’ll hopefully find the extension useful on its own merits, the fact that the source code has been released as part of an open source project means that the extension’s code can serve as inspiration (or a jumping off point) for writing your own JavaScript code that interacts with the YouTube API. Curious as to how to use OAuth to authenticate YouTube accounts from a Chrome Extension? Or request JSON data with a JavaScript callback? The answers await you in the source code!