April Meetup: Google Glass experience

Aygul Zagidullina shared the experience of wearing Google Glass with us by joining in via hangout. The glasses are extremely light, to a point that you actually think you lost them. The battery life is only two hours when the screen is on; however, through good battery and energy management it manages to run for a full day of regular use. The font size is rather small, developers should be careful not to send too many notifications to the device as otherwise it will get very noisy.

Thanks Aygul for taking your time to share it with you and answer our questions! This report from your first-hand experience was great.

Our next meetup is Google I/O Extended!

AR.Drone Hackathon

On Saturday, April 13th a small group of people met up in Metalab for a hackathon centered around the AR.Drone based on a Chrome App project (while other people preferred to spend the nice weather outside).

While we didn't have many participants we still managed to get two groups working on quite different projects.

+Kariem Hussein, +Marc Edem and +Turdean Timea worked on controlling the drone with gestures recognized via a webcam. (Source code)

+Anna Kastlunger, +Gerwin Sturm and +Shadi Abanni first started off trying to get the video stream working which turned out more troublesome than expected. They then changed plans and worked with the navigation data provided by the drone to give some visual feedback about orientation, altitude and battery state inside of the Chrome App. (Source code)

Most importantly we had lots of fun trying not to crash the Drone too often :)

You can find several photos and videos of the event on the Google+ Event page

March Meetup: Upcoming Events, Mirror API, Dart

Kariem Hussein gave a summary on the upcoming events of GDG Vienna. On Saturday, 13 April we will have a dedicated AR Drone Hackathon, later in May Google I/O Extended, and our AppEngine hackathon will now be on 15 June.

Gerwin Sturm talked about Google Glasses and the Mirror API. Google Glasses will be programmed through the cloud, using a REST-based API. The original expectations that applications might be written directly running on Google Glasses seem not to come true. See this summary paper for more details!

Nik Graf from blossom io offered us insight into the usage of Dart at their product. More can also be read on the post from Thomas Schranz.

Thanks to all who were coming! It was a very nice atmosphere again.
See you on Saturday 13 April for the AR.Drone Hackathon!

February Meetup: Google Cloud Endpoints, Google+ Sign-In

Gerwin Sturm gave a presentation on Google Cloud Endpoints, a way to create your own REST based APIs running on Google App Engine. You could say just in time as preparation for our App Engine Hackathon in March!
Gerwin also gave a short round-up on the newly announced Google+ Sign-In which was announced only few hours before our meetup. And he mentioned the History API which is now integral part of the Google+ API.
Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ gave a talk on REST APIs, the way API discovery is working with Google, the usage (or non-usage) of RFCs, ... He made clear that Cloud Endpoints are actually not REST APIs but only HTTP-based APIs. If interested in really restful API design he recommends the following reading:
RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby, RESTbucks, and - if you want are short on money - readthedocs.org.
Sergii Kauk presented the findings on duosecurity showing that application specific passwords are not really application specific but allow access to all regular Google services, and until recently even to the settings of two-factor authentication.
Thanks for coming, it was a great event again! The next event will be our meetup on Thursday(!), 28th of March.

January Meetup

We had a great presentation and introduction into +Ingress by +Anna Kastlunger. She made the essential terms like XM, Portal, Resonator, XMP Burster easy to understand. Really a great way of starting to play Ingress! She then shared invite codes with interested members (and yes, we still have some - just comment on this post on G+!)

Afterwards +Sergii Kauk showed the various ways of authorizing requests to Google APIs: OAuth 2.0 (the only non-deprecated way), OAuth 1.0, AuthSub, and Client Login (including application-specific passwords). He also went into the details of 2-legged OAuth 1.0 for Google Apps and the specifics of service accounts for OAuth 2.0 and the use of the API console.

Then we had a lightning talk by +Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ: why you should have your own domain. Not only is your own domain more beautiful with maybe a cryptic number at your internet provider, but it also allows your services and email addresses to be portable - they go with your when you change the ISP. And he then went into the details of OpenID which allows to have your own identity server hosted by you.

Thanks to all for coming and making this such a nice event!

GDG Vienna 2012 review and 2013 forecast

We started the year 2012 as GTUG Vienna, and already in January we had our first big event, the Google Apps Script Hackathon. Gifted developers created great applications, the winning one being Gogles - running Go (the game) on Google Spreadsheet.
In our monthly meetups we had as usual interesting topics, e.g. a discussion on the salaries for programmers in Austria, presentations on Closure, Dart, Hangout API and many more, every time worth to come! Finally in May we have announced our new name, GDG Vienna - Google Developer Group Vienna. But even with the new name we are still an independent user group powered by you.
The next highlight was Google I/O Extended 2012, which this time has been for three days, including hangouts with the Vienna guys being in San Francisco.
One of the announcements of Google I/O in 2012 were Google+ Events, and we started to make the best use of them immediately.
It did not take long to announce the next big event - DevFest Vienna! In cooperation with the Java Student User Group at the TU Wien we have organized an amazing festivity for developers in mobile, cloud, social & web, including an awesome after-party powered by Cenarion and giveaways provided by Google and O'Reilly. The hackathon on Sunday gave birth to great applications, see pictures and more details on the events page.

So what is the plan for 2013? Currently we are preparing for a spring Hackathon, Google I/O Extended 2013 will be again on the agenda, for summer we are considering making an outdoor event (maybe with a campfire), and in fall we will have again DevFest Vienna.
Additionally we will continue with monthly meetups (but maybe on a different date) and some small-scale workshops on specific topics.
All this will be made possible by a new organizers team with fresh energy and enthusiasm: Gerwin Sturm, Kariem Hussein, Marc Edem, Anna Kastlunger, Thomas Bandion and Helmuth Breitenfellner.

Thank for all your participation in 2012 & stay tuned for upcoming 2013 announcements!

DevFest Vienna 2012

We had DevFest Vienna this weekend as a joint event from us (GDG Vienna) and the Java Student User Group.

A total of 143 people checked-in on day 1 at the TU Wien for sessions on mobile and web, cloud and social. A total of eleven sessions offered something for everyone!

The afterparty at the Nelson's was a great opportunity for socializing, completing day 1.  We had small color-changing lights on the table which attendees were allowed to take home afterwards, free drinks, music, a C64 emulator installation, a raffle of some prizes like books, Raspberry Pi's or Arduino kits, ... - a great relaxing atmosphere for chatting and exchanging ideas.

For the hackathon in the Metalab we had to limit the number of tickets offered. We had a prize for every attendee: Nexus 7 as the main prize for the winning teams and then a Sphero ball, Raspberry Pi's, Arduinos, books, Android-shaped loudspeakers, ...

All sessions were recorded and we are in the process of uploading them to youtube, together with links to the session materials. Stay tuned!

Part of DevFest Vienna organizers team

Our next regular meeting is on Tuesday, 20 November. Looking forward to seeing you there!