Happy Hallo-Wave-een!

I moved down to Australia a year ago, and just a few weeks ago, decided to stay here indefinitely because it's an awesome country. It has beaches, forests, cities, shark-eating-shark, kangaroos, and drop bears. What more could you want? Well, there is one thing: Halloween. I am a huge fan of any holiday that revolves around dressing up in ridiculous outfits and being rewarded with candy for it. Heck, I have two permanent (and really nasty looking) scars from trick-or-treating incidents, and I still love the holiday. (Tip: If your witch cape is held on by a shoestring, make sure you don't get the end of the cape caught under the wheels of a car when it revs up.) So, I've decided to show the Google Wave team what halloween is all about, first by dressing up like a faceless robot avatar (in honor of the recently resolved issue 335), and second by collaborating with Austin, another displaced American, to create a trick-or-treating extension for Google Wave.

The "Tricky" extension uses all of the Wave APIs together to create an interactive Halloween experience. First, the extension installer gives you an option in your New Wave menu to "Go Trick or Treating". When you click that, it creates a new wave and inserts a gadget (try clicking around that to see what surprises await). Then, whenever a user types 'trick or treat', the robot fetches an image from Google Image Search for either a yummy candy bar, or well, something not that yummy. Now, all of you world-wide developers can go trick or treating together, by visiting this WaveSandbox.com sample wave -- and learn the Wave APIs at the same time, by browsing through the code.

Have fun, and let us know in the forum if you found other wave-y ways to celebrate Halloween.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations