Web Directions » APIs

Julio Cesar Ody — CSS3 and Backbone.js for killer mobile apps

Guy Leech — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 10:37:34 +0000

Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 13th.

Session description

Learn how to build great looking and high performance mobile web applications leveraging CSS3 animations and Backbone.js, along with some cool use cases for geolocation and localStorage.

This session will describe in length a boilerplate you can use for developing your own apps aimed at A grade mobile devices and tablets.

About Julio Cesar Ody

Julio has been a full-stack software developer for the 12 years of his career, and during this time he went from being a GNU/Linux and Unix sysadmin, to a VoIP PBX architect, and finally a software developer.

Since moving to Australia from Brazil, he has worked on startups and companies building software and at the same time, stuck his nose as much as he can into the human side of the software equation, understanding developer productivity, how software companies work, and product development.

More recently he grew too interested in design for his own good, and began freelancing under the codename of Awesome By Design, writing a bunch of software which he open sourced on GitHub, giving presentations using his own presentation framework, and building software that not only does the job, but does so in style.

Follow Julio on Twitter: @julio_ody

Damon Oehlman — HTML5 API Soup

Guy Leech — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:22:31 +0000

Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 14th.

Presentation slides

External slides.

Session description

Most jaw-dropping apps use multiple HTML5 APIs in creative ways, rather than a single API in isolation. In this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps. Then just for fun we’ll look at how you can dish up something really special by throwing in ingredients like canvas, video and WebGL.

About Damon Oehlman

Damon Oehlman is an experienced web and mobile applications developer. He has worked with small and large companies to develop software solutions for desktop, web and most recently mobile devices. His first technical book, Pro Android Web Apps, was released earlier this year by Apress. Damon currently runs his own software development and consulting firm Sidelab, which specializes in cross-platform mobile solutions. Damon’s aptly titled tech blog Distractable offers a mix of articles, tutorials and other shiny things. He is a proud dad, husband and one day dreams of owning his own underground lair.

Follow Damon on Twitter: @damonoehlman

Michael Mahemoff — HTML5: Online and Offline

Guy Leech — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:55:04 +0000

Web Directions USA 2010, Loews Atlanta Hotel, September 24 10.10am.

Presentation slides

The presentation slides are available on Michael’s website.

Session description

HTML5 introduces several so-called “offline” technologies: application caching, local storage, and file access, to name a few. But these technologies are not just for purely offline apps; they boost startup performance, overcome network outages, and partition content away from the server. This talk will explain how you can incorporate these technologies into your work today and identify the features browsers will be supporting in the near future.

About Michael Mahemoff

Michael Mahemoff is a Chrome Developer Advocate for Google, based in London, always looking at ways to make the web a more habitable place for users and developers alike. He’s been programming on the web since the mid ’90s, in a range of public-facing and enterprise (Java, what else?) contexts, and is the author of Ajax Design Patterns (O’Reilly, 2006) and a blogger for Ajaxian.com. Server side, he’s mostly a Ruby, PHP, and NodeJS guy and sushi is his preferred coding fuel. Michael holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, covering software design patterns for improving user experience.

Ben Schwarz — Building a better web with HTML5

Guy Leech — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 10:05:17 +0000

Web Directions South 2010, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 14 11.45am.

Audio recording of session
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Session description
About Ben Schwarz

Presentation slides

Session description

Devices have caught up; That is, our technology dreams from the mid 90’s have finally been realised. However since this time, HTML has lay dormant. We’ve been through a decade of tech wasteland. It’s time to change the status quo and take back the web.

During my session we’ll look at where the future of HTML lies, including new structural elements. You’ll also grasp an introduction to associated technologies that have come into popularity with the steam of HTML5: SVG, Web Sockets, Web Workers, Geo-location and making applications useful offline.

About Ben Schwarz

Ben Schwarz is a well known Melbourne Rubyist who funds his love of good food (at home) and sake (in bars) by designing sophisticated web applications using standards-based technology. More than anything else, he is driven by a maniacal desire to produce not only elegant code, but also beautiful software in the hands of its users.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenSchwarz

Max Wheeler — Location, location, geolocation

Guy Leech — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 09:21:47 +0000

Web Directions South 2010, Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, October 15 11.45am.

Audio recording of session
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Session description
About Max Wheeler

Presentation slides

Session description

Phones with GPS are now widely available and the growing support for the JavaScript geolocation API means location based services aren’t restricted to the realm of native applications. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this information and add provide your users with the best personal and contextual experience.

This session will take you through building a location-based mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Including cross-platform techniques for figuring out where your users are, and providing graceful fallbacks options for devices that don’t have geolocation support (or users that don’t want to tell you exactly). You’ll learn about geocoding to a physical address (and the other way around) and look at how to build a mobile-friendly map with local points of interest.

About Max Wheeler

An interaction designer with a passion for emerging technologies, Max believes the web should function as beautifully as it looks. He currently resides in Canberra where he works with Icelab, a media-agnostic design agency with a team of good people.

In his spare time Max takes photographs, travels the world, and builds web applications that do useful things. His latest pet project is Decaf Sucks, a site for helping you to find the good cafés and avoid the bad ones. He also happens to be the current world champion in the sport of beach ultimate.

Follow Max on Twitter: @makenosound

David Peterson — Semantic web for distributed social networks

jessie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:24:39 +0000

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.

Presentation slides

Session description

Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.

About David Peterson

David Peterson has been a web developer since 1995. He works way up north in the tropics of Townsville, about as far from any tech as possible. Currently he is Head of Research at BoaB interactive and is working hard to kickstart the Semantic Web down under. Not only that, but he is an Advisory Committee representative to the W3C. Wow.

His wonderful family, making lovely photographs and searching for the perfect espresso keeps him happy.

Myles Eftos — Web APIs, Oauth and OpenID: A developer’s guide

jessie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:37:04 +0000

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 1.40pm.

Audio recording of session
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Session description
About Myles Eftos

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Session description

Online web applications are big business, with many people relying on the cloud for data storage and workflow. These days, an API is an essential part of any online system, but this presents authentication and authorisation issues for the humble web developer. Learn how to create Web APIs, how OpenID and Oauth works and what you need to do to implement them.

About Myles Eftos

Myles is a Perth-based Web developer who feels as at home building INNER JOINS as he does calculating the specificity of CSS selectors. He has worked in all the major web languages, with his weapon of choice being Ruby on Rails. He is a big advocate of semantic CSS, and unobtrusive JavaScript. He has a weakness for code double dares, many of which have resulted in crazy experiments, such as @baggygreen: a twitter cricket commentator and a version of Super Mario Bros. written entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

During his 8-years in the industry, working under the moniker of MadPilot Productions, he has worked with pretty much everyone in Perth. He has also been on the committee of the Australian Web Industry Association since it’s inception, currently residing in the role of event coordinator.

Gina Trapani — Better Gmail: How Google Opened Gmail’s Web Interface to Any Developer Who Cares (And Why You Should)

jessie — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:47:53 +0000

A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.

MP3 of presentation
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Session description
About Gina Trapani

Presentation slides

Session description

Last year, Google released an experimental Greasemonkey API for Gmail: coding hooks that let anyone add CSS and Javascript to Gmail that enhances how it looks and behaves. Why would you want to do this? Why wouldn’t you? Hear how Google’s using Greasemonkey to distribute Gmail development amongst independent web developers–and how those developers are integrating their own product into Gmail — resulting in a Better Gmail for everyone.

About Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a web developer and the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, the 2006 Wired Rave Award–winning daily weblog on software and productivity.

Kaitlin Sherwood & Steffen Meschkat — The Business and Technology of Mashups

jessie — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:37:58 +0000

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.

MP3 of presentation (Kaitlin Sherwood)
MP3 of presentation (Steffen Meschkat)
Session description
About Kaitlin Sherwood
About Steffen Meschkat

Session description

Mashups are the hottest web development topic today. Hear about the front-end, back-end, and business issues of mashups with these two experts who know more about them than just about anyone.

Kaitlin Sherwood: Overview of Maps Mashup Technologies

In the past two years, there has been an explosion of tools for conveying geographic information to the masses. In this talk, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood will introduce major concepts and issues, and discuss the pros and cons of each of the major mashup frameworks. Attendees will gain an appreciation for their mapping options, and information to help them better choose between them based on their particular needs.

Steffen Meschkat

A central topic of “Web 2.0” is browser-side web application programming interfaces (APIs) and the specific type of web application they give rise to: mashups.

Using the Google Maps API as an example, I put this development into a perspective that allows one to appreciate how this, on the one hand, is a natural and coherent evolution of the Web that, on the other hand, significantly alters the ways of organizing the world’s information that the Web makes possible. I also discuss the specific technologies that web APIs for mashups are based upon, and their sometimes challenging idiosyncrasies.

About Steffen Meschkat

Steffen Meschkat joined Google in 2004 and currently works on maps.

He earlier co-founded ART+COM AG and datango AG . At ART+COM, he worked on industry funded application research projects of Virtual Reality and, since 1993, the WWW. For datango, he built the client side components of the navigation suite, a technology that augments web applications by simulated user interaction fragments. He has an MSc (”Diplom”) in Physics from Humboldt University in Berlin.

Kaitlin Sherwood

With a keen eye for how people interact with technology now and the creativity to see how they could be using it in the future, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood started developing innovative Web sites in 1994. In addition to winning a 1995 GNN Best of the Web award, she developed one of the first webmail applications and the first navigation system for a large campus that integrated maps and floorplans.

Most recently, she developed the first mashup to feature thematic (area-based) maps, overlaying census bureau data on Google Maps. On the strength of this, she earned a summer internship at the Maps group of Google, and no, she’s not yet allowed to tell you what she worked on. She has since returned to her graduate studies at the University of British Columbia.

Sherwood spent several years as a “email anthropologist”, studying how people use electronic mail. From those experiences, she wrote two practical books and provided training to corporate and governmental clients on how to manage email better. She and her advice have been featured in the the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Tech TV, and many others.

George Oates and Paul Hammond — Web Apps: Developer to Designer

jessie — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 06:38:44 +0000

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.

Session description
About George Oates
About Paul Hammon

Session description

Web apps are an intimate marriage of back-end systems and client-side interaction, but it takes two very different skill sets to build robust scalable application platforms and create smooth user interfaces that work in multiple browsers.

In this session, George Oates and Paul Hammond consider the development process from the perspective of both back– and front-end developers, and the cooperation required between them. They’ll discuss how simple architecture choices, development patterns and — above all — good communication are key to making the relationship work.

About Paul Hammond

Paul Hammond is a web developer, product manager and father. He has been building websites for as long as he can remember, and is now part of the Yahoo! Technology Development group. Before that he led technical project management at BBC Radio and Music interactive.

Paul regularly speaks on subjects from javascript and APIs to the future of broadcasting, at events including Emerging Technology, d.Construct and xtech. He is currently living somewhere between London and San Francisco, and keeps a technical weblog at paulhammond.org.

About George Oates

George Oates joined a company called Ludicorp back in the middle of 2003, having moved from Australia, where she had enjoyed a successful career in the web industry. At the time, Ludicorp was making a hilarious online game called Game Neverending and George jumped in, helping design game elements, the GNE universe, and how players interacted.

It wasn’t long before Ludicorp shifted gears somewhat and decided to enter the photo-sharing space. We were all torn between wanting to keep doing fun game things and the need for money. So, we managed to find a way to blend the two, and Flickr was born!