Chris Alexander

On Engineering

Google Chrome, HTML 5 and the Google Technology User Group

17th March, 2010

Last night I was fortunate enough to be at the Google Technology User Group meetup at Phonica Records in London.

This was the first of these I’ve attended, and went in at the deep end - the event featured numerous speakers from Google, and I did a 5 (and a bit!) minute lightning talk on a little something I’ve been working on (more on that below).

Presenting at the event was Arne Kurrik (@kurrik), Ernest Delgado (@edr) and Jeremy Orlow.

Arne gave a great overview of how Chrome Extensions work. Even though I have been building one, the talk was still really informative and taught me some stuff I didn’t know; I should imagine it was also great for beginners as it was pitched as an introduction.

Ernest and Jeremy teamed up to talk about HTML 5. More of a “collection of technologies” than a standard in itself, HTML 5 has been growing quickly and this was a brilliant talk that brought me right up to speed with the latest HTML tags, CSS tricks and Javascript APIs that will be available in HTML 5-compliant browsers.

It was also brilliant to have a chat with the Google guys, initially about Chrome extensions but covering a huge range of topics, including Twitter, Pubsubhubbub, Chrome itself and lots more.

Thanks to all the organisers and presenters, it was a great evening and I will definitely be looking forward to the next one!

TweetMeme Chrome Extension

For those who missed my lightening talk, this is what I demoed - a little retweet button for Chrome you can take anywhere on the web! Watch the TweetMeme blog for information on when it will be released.

Here’s the other photos I took on the night.

Thanks to Ade from Google for the last one.