July 21st Wavefront meeting recap

While we were setting up for our Vancouver meet-up at the Wavefront building on Hastings street, the pizza delivery guy showed up with about 40 pizzas for the room full of developers we were expecting. With his arrival came the first of the highlights of the evening: butter chicken pizza! I have to say that I wasn’t sure what to expect, and even the first bite left me on the fence. But as soon as I took that second bite, I was sold. I am really glad that I got that first piece because as soon as everyone started showing up, it was like the Nicholas Cage movie, Gone In Sixty Seconds. It also made the job of setting up the display station of our devices (we brought some Wave IIs, Galaxy S IIs and Tab 10.1s) much more enjoyable. :)

Even though it wasn’t that warm outside (ESPECIALLY for the middle of July), I was really glad the air conditioning was pumping since the room started to heat up once it was filled with 90+people. We met people from some really interesting companies and hopefully managed to entertain and enlighten them with our overviews of the upcoming Samsung devices, updates to the Samsung Developers program, and information on some Android developer tools we’ve released. Highlight number two of the evening: some really good questions! One of my favorites is how are we are going to get devices into the hands of developers so that they can get their applications up and running on Honeycomb? There is good news for you developers in Vancouver: we are shipping a couple Tab 10.1s to Wavefront for you to borrow and use for testing. For the rest of you, talk to your local Samsung Developers representative. Most of the regional teams are setting up loaner programs so you, too, can borrow the devices you need.

To end the meet-up, we brought our good pals at PhoneGap to present their cross-platform solution and demo how it works on our bada platform. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PhoneGap, it’s an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages the most familiar web technologies, HTML and JavaScript. PhoneGap is now in alpha on bada and we are looking for developers to test it out and get us feedback, so if you have the inkling to try it out, download the SDK at http://www.phonegap.com/.

Highlight number three: after the meet-up, I had the pleasure of talking to a handful of developers to get their one on one candid feedback and insight. I learned that there are Canadians that think the US has no good beer! Blasphemy! I will have to make a point of showing them otherwise if they ever come to San Jose.

Thanks so much to Wavefront for helping us host this event, to Nitobi for co-presenting, and to all the Vancouver developers who made the evening memorable. We look forward to crossing the border to talk with our Canadian developers again sometime soon!

P.S. This pic has been dubbed the preacher Mel pic :)