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

Back in May and June, members of the Google Wave team traveled the world meeting developers in the SF Bay Area, Asia, and South America. Now, we're heading to Europe, and we're eager to meet all the European developers that are hacking on the Google Wave APIs.

There are many upcoming events — with links for registration and more details:

• London, England
• Oct. 26: GTUG London
• Vienna, Austria
• Oct 27: TechEd SAP
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Oct. 28: Dutch GTUG
• Oct. 30: eComm Europe 2009
• Zurich, Switzerland
• Nov. 2: Google Wave Tech Talk
• Prague, Czech Republic
• Nov. 6: Google Developer Day: Prague
• Moscow, Russia
• Nov. 10: Google Developer Day: Moscow
• Munich, Germany
• Nov. 11: GTUG Munich

We're looking forward to updating you on all things Google Wave, chatting with you about what you've already built, and hearing what else you'd like to do with Google Wave APIs.

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

I'm happy to announce that the Google Wave team will be presenting at a specially-arranged London GTUG meetup on Monday, October 26. Stephanie Hannon and Lars Rasmussen will give a talk about Google Wave and the APIs that are currently available, and discuss some of what we've learned as a result of the developer preview and where we're headed next. There will also be ample time for Q&A, and you're welcome to submit questions beforehand. We hope to meet a lot of current WaveSandbox.com developers, and inspire others to get started building great extensions. No need to wait for the talk though — you can jump in and check out the docs and the samples.

The event will be held at the Google London office at 6pm on Monday, October 26. We have limited seats, so act fast to request yours. Please sign up here.

We look forward to seeing many of you there! If you're in Europe, but can't make it to London — stay tuned for another post talking about the rest of the European tour.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

The Google Wave Samples Gallery has been a great way to see what developers have been creating and find starter code to build on. We added a search box to enable developers to find what they're looking for, but we heard that it still wasn't easy to find examples of code that uses a particular class/method or does one particular task. So, we've added a few new features to the gallery:

Best Practices

Some samples just demonstrate a fun and inspiring use of the API, but others demonstrate a nice use of a particular API feature, like how a robot can set the state of a gadget, or how a gadget can store per-participant keys. We wanted to call out these samples and make them easier to find, so we've added a "best practice" badge, highlighted these samples on the front page, and added a filter. We've also added a form field to the submit page, so that developers can tell us what aspects of the APIs their sample shows off.

Indexed Code Repositories

When a developer submits a sample, they must also submit a URL that points at their source code. Most of the time, this URL is to a public SVN or GIT repository. We've now added these URLs to the custom search engine that powers the search box, so that when you search, you'll also get results from code files. This makes it easier to find usage of particular parts of the API. Search for "GetDocument" as an example.

Code Snippets

When a developer submits a sample, they can specify that they're submitting a "Code Snippet" or a "Working Sample". With a code snippet, instead of providing links to the robot address, gadget XML, or installer XML, they need only to provide useful lines of code. You can use this to share some bit of code that you've written, even if you don't want to share the whole sample. And if at some point you want to change a snippet into a working sample, you can do that. Check out my Send Email from a Robot snippet for an example.

We hope that you will find these new features useful while you're designing your own Wave-y extensions. And, don't forget to subscribe to the recent samples ATOM feed to find out about new samples in the gallery.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations