Presentations about web apps

Podcasts, slides, videos and more

David Peterson — Semantic web for distributed social networks

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

David Peterson PortraitHear 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.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

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

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

Myles Eftos PortraitOnline 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.

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Robert Hoekman Jr — The essential elements of great web applications

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008, and Web Direction Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Robert Hoekman, Jr PortraitMost great web appli­ca­tions have a few key things in com­mon. But can you name them? Better yet — can you achieve them con­sis­tently in your own projects?

In this clos­ing keynote, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of the Amazon best­seller Designing the Obvious (New Riders) describes the seven qual­i­ties of great web-​​based soft­ware and how to achieve each and every one of them by learn­ing to com­mu­ni­cate through design. See why it’s impor­tant to build only what’s absolutely essen­tial, apply instruc­tive design, cre­ate error-​​proof inter­ac­tions, sur­face commonly-​​used fea­tures, and more in this infor­ma­tive ses­sion that will change the way you work and enable your users to walk away from your soft­ware feel­ing pro­duc­tive, respected, and smart.

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Jenny Telford — Opening up government data

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Jenny Telford PortraitMapping and other mashups have taken the web world by storm — dri­ving inno­va­tion in busi­ness and gov­ern­ment alike. While much of the focus has been on the actual mashup appli­ca­tions, with­out the data to mashup, we have no mashups. Government, from local to Federal level, col­lect and man­age a sig­nif­i­cant amount of data, across a very broad range of areas. But giv­ing access to this data to web appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers has tech­ni­cal, pol­icy and legal chal­lenges. In this pre­sen­ta­tion, Jenny Telford of the ABS looks at these issues from their expe­ri­ence of open­ing up data from the Australian Census.

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Andy Budd — Designing the experience curve

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.

Andy Budd PortraitThese days peo­ple expect more from a web­site than a handy set of tools and a pretty inter­face — they want an expe­ri­ence. From the moment some­body enters your site they’ll be judg­ing you on every­thing from the way the site looks to the tone of your error mes­sages. And they won’t just be judg­ing you against other sites. They will be judg­ing you on every cus­tomer expe­ri­ence they have ever had, from the rude man at the train sta­tion to the lovely hotel clerk that checked them in on hol­i­day. So in order to com­pete, we need to up our game and look at expe­ri­ences both on and off-​​line.

In this ses­sion Andy Budd will look at the 9 key fac­tors that go into design­ing the per­fect cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. By tak­ing exam­ples from the world around us, Andy will dis­cuss how we can turn util­i­tar­ian expe­ri­ences into some­thing wonderful.

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

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

Gina Trapani PortraitLast 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.

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Brian Oberkirch – “Plays Well With Others”: Simple Things to Make the Social Parts of your Service More Social

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

Brian Oberkirch Portrait Not only are most Web appli­ca­tions going to have (or uti­lize) social com­po­nents — they’re also going to have start shar­ing social infor­ma­tion like pro­files, con­tact lists and such with other ser­vices. The ’social net­work fatigue’ users feel and the inef­fi­cien­cies of keep­ing this infor­ma­tion in mul­ti­ple spots will drive us to play bet­ter with other social apps. This ses­sion will focus on using sim­ple build­ing blocks and emerg­ing design pat­terns to keep it sim­ple for users, for you and for the open social Web at large.

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Andre Charland & Walter Smith – Developing With Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.

Crash Course in Adobe AIR

Andre Charlan Portrait There comes a time when web devel­op­ers need to reach beyond the browser to allow users to go offline, use local files or get rid of the hideous browser chrome. The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is an up an com­ing run­time tech­nol­ogy that allows desk­top appli­ca­tions to be devel­oped with HTML, JavaScript, Flash or Flex. The AIR run­time and SDK are com­pletely free so any­one can get started immediately.

Andre Charland will will give an overview or AIR, the APIs you get access to and how to build a sim­ple Flex and HTML appli­ca­tion with it. From there we will explore some of the tools avail­able to make AIR devel­op­ment eas­ier and faster. We’ll fin­ish up with a few impor­tant usabil­ity guide­lines and real world case stud­ies of AIR projects.

A real world overview of Silverlight

Walter Smith PortraitSeattle-​​based Jackson Fish Market helped deliver the Silverlight based search engine Tafiti, one of the ear­li­est com­mer­cial Silverlight applications.

In this pre­sen­ta­tion, Jackson Fish Market co-​​founder Walter Smith will give us a detailed overview of Microsoft’s RIA tech­nol­ogy Silverlight. We’ll learn from Walter’s first hand expe­ri­ence the strengths and weak­nesses of the plat­form, and see real world exam­ples of what Silverlight can be used to achieve.

If you are look­ing to eval­u­ate RIA frame­works, or just get a sense of the emerg­ing RIA land­scape, this ses­sion will prove invaluable.

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Boris Mann — The 3 stages of dynamic systems

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.

Boris Mann Portrait

Content man­age­ment sys­tems have all but replaced the for­mer art of pub­lish­ing sta­tic HTML pages. From let­ting clients edit and add con­tent, to con­tent like cal­en­dars and forums that defy the “page” con­ven­tion, dynamic inter­ac­tive web­sites keep vis­i­tors com­ing back. At some point your web­site goes beyond just a site filled with HTML pages and actu­ally becomes a full-​​fledged web application.

From these fea­tures, we extract three stages of con­tent man­age­ment — sim­ple con­tent man­age­ment, beyond the blog, and build­ing your own web application.

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Raul Vera — Mashups, web apps and APIs

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.

Raul Vera PortraitHear all about the excit­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties cre­ated by these tech­nolo­gies from Google Australia.

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Mark Mansour — RedBubble: Building a site for people with big imaginations

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.

Mark Mansour PortraitRedBubble is a social net­work­ing plat­form and mar­ket­place, not to men­tion a suc­cess­ful home­grown web app. In this ses­sion RedBubble’s soft­ware archi­tect Mark Mansour will present the chal­lenges the team has faced, and talk through some of the solu­tions they’ve dis­cov­ered, dur­ing the build­ing and scal­ing one of Australia’s largest Rails appli­ca­tions. Along the way you’ll learn RedBubble’s tenets for soft­ware design, the what’s and how’s of their data­base and web servers, plus processes that made their team more effec­tive. If you’re a devel­oper dream­ing of going out on your own and build­ing a suc­cess­ful online busi­ness around a web app, don’t miss this session.

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Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson — The story of Campaign Monitor

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson Portrait

Campaign Monitor is a great home grown web app suc­cess story. Dave and Ben will share their expe­ri­ences of tak­ing an idea they believed in, work­ing like mad to imple­ment it, and get­ting it to mar­ket. Along the way you’ll hear about how the idea was born, decid­ing what to build, pric­ing, build­ing the prod­uct, get­ting the word out, han­dling sup­port from Sydney, and all those things you’ll never know till you try. See the slides and hear the podcast »

Kelly Goto — The Iterative App

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Kelly Goto Portrait

Between the diverse demands of clients, bosses, engi­neers, and design­ers, Web appli­ca­tion design has reached a new level of frenzy and dis­cord. You know what we mean, and so does Kelly Goto, who has refined Web process and project man­age­ment to an art form. In this ses­sion, she takes you through the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment process. Learn the behind-​​the-​​scenes tech­niques behind rapid pro­to­typ­ing, and see how to enhance your cur­rent process to include iter­a­tive usabil­ity test­ing cycles. You’ll also dis­cover how to ver­ify devel­op­ment require­ments before you code by employ­ing PDF pro­to­types and HTML click-​​throughs. With a col­lab­o­ra­tive mind­set and the proper process in place, design and engi­neer­ing teams can work together and launch the “iter­a­tive app” suc­cess­fully. See the slides and hear the podcast »