The conference is over, and it was a good overview of the state of SVG across many topics: the spec, browser support, JavaScript libraries, IE workarounds and usage in the mobile industry. What I was interested was to see how far is the 1.1 spec implementation in browsers supporting this technology, hacks (SVG Web) to deliver SVG content to IE users and examples of accessibility using SVG.

You can find links to all papers and presentations on the svgopen.org website if you use the Schedule page and click on presentation titles.

The paper I presented, “Rich Media Advertising with SVG and JavaScript“ or “Introducing SVG and HTML5 VIDEO element to the mainstream advertising”, had a good competition from Wikipedia presenting on the other conference track, was well received and few good points were raised by the audience.

Overall, for what I’m interested in, implementing Open Web technologies in advertising, I would say we are still not quite there in terms of browsers implementations and support, but also that is not a reason not to start doing early attempts, start with a bit simpler solutions that could work cross-browser and do preparations for the near future. Not sure how advertising Agencies will adopt something that is not having even alpha versions of tools and software available on the market, but surely we have to start somewhere.

There is no clear and strong signal that any soon IE will have native support for the SVG technology, but I hope it will be a case in near future.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickymontalvo

This was announced just two weeks before the conference start by @bradneuberg. Microsoft is joining IBM as gold sponsor for the SVG Open 2009 – “SVG coming of ege.”, hosted by Google in Mountain View, California 2-4 October. Wow!, what a nice display of big players supporting the event.

What does this mean? Are we finally going to have SVG support for Internet Explorer, or at least they are thinking about it? Even if they decide to do so, what do you think, how long it will take to have IE8 patch released with native SVG support? If they plan to do this, wait is going to be worth while. We alrady have ways around to render SVG in IE thanks to SVG Web, still in alpha though, getting better and better, but native support is best, right?

Personally, I would really like to see Microsoft going in this direction. It is all surreal to me to be true. But hey, they adopted jQuery as JS Library for the new .Net platform, who knows, maybe this guys are really starting to open up. But, I’m not going to get excited unless I see some real signals this is going to happen. Still very sceptical.

On Monday 22/12/2008, I will be part of open discussion about Internet Applications, Web Technologies and Online Advertising. The talk is taking place in Skopje, Macedonia. Organizers are Darko Buldiovski, author and blogger from komunikacii.net – a blog about everything new media in Macedonia, New Media Center and Free Software Macedonia.

We are going to talk about developing web apps and how the latest web technology trends are applied particularly on the Macedonian web market. Also, I will be presenting my view on the online advertising in Macedonia and say a few words what the current state is in my opinion.

The Venue is “The Cultural Center Tocka“. Presentations and discussions start 17:00. Drop by if your Monday evening is not already planned. It will be great to hear different opinions on this topics from local active participants and professionals.

On Monday I attended “Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From The Ground Up Tour“.

First half of the 9 hours marathon to present ActionScript 3 was a true beginners course to Object Oriented Programming. With AS3, Adobe finally manages to provide dissent environment, IDE and run-time. It will appeal to lots of developers (Java developers will be quite exited about it, its very similar syntax), but it will be putting off lots of designers (as many I know who were there are not very happy what they saw), as they don’t get it, and some of them probably never will. Good news for them is that THE time-line is not going away and they can still make some money with the manual-non-scripting approach. The market will decide who is going to stay in the game.

Second half of the presentation was actually much more interesting for me, because Colin Moock show how all things link together using Eclipse Flex IDE and a browser to develop small web application. So, you can develop smooth rich media app outside Flash, but the bad news is, you still have to pay for the IDE and the compiler. Hmmm, I don’t like that. Seems like they missed the whole point of attracting new army of developers to develop new applications for potential rich media content delivery.

Whole examples and tutorials presented are in Moock’s book Essential Actionscript 3.0.

The presentation was great and he is calm and brilliant presenter.

Presentation slides can be found here.

Code examples used in the presentation can be found here.

Flex 3 Builder Pro or Flex Eclipse Plugin (you can get 60 days trail) or Free Flex 2 SDK can be found here.

For me, I’m still for developing in the holy web standards trinity XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I can see great potential in using Flex as addition to this for some solutions.

… “we have only 300 employees” – says Dave Morin, a Senior Platform Manager of Facebook. Huh? Small? Ask UK/European companies what small means. Obviosly there are big differences between the US and the rest of the world about ‘size’. It was great to hear presentation of the currently most busiest social networking web app in the world. Well done to the FOWA organizers.

For the FOWA’s second day my top 3 presentations were:

• Simon Wardley, – Short on Cycles, Long on Storage
• Eric Rodenbeck, (Stamen Design) – Next Generation Visualisations
• Dick Costolo (Feedburner) – Launch Late to Iterate Often

“Let your company have a voice and culture” – are probably the words said by Dick Costolo echoing in my head today. For the end, I enjoyed Leisa Reichelt’s presentation on “Ambient Intimacy”. She said really nice thoughts about human nature and user behavior on the web.

… were the first words echoing in my head after the first day at the FOWA conference. The presentation by Robin Christopherson, (AbilityNet) – “The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites”, about accessibility and the current state of what’s out there was brilliant. Just to see how one of the biggest online business (amazon.co.uk, Yahoo) maintain and develop nearly impossible to access websites and online services is terrifying.

In my design and development practise I try to develop as much as possible accessible web applications using web standards, but sometimes the business requirements are impossible to met while taking care of everything. It is easier for websites and smaller projects, but for web applications is much harder.

My top 3 presentations were:

Daniel Burka (digg / Pownce) “How User Feedback can Influences Design”, Lane Becker & Thor Muller (Satisfaction) – “Customer Service is the New Marketing” and Dion Almaer, (Ajaxian.com) – “How to take your app offline”.

Of course here were other brilliant speeches, and they were all excellent, ending with the live recording of the Diggnation video podcast as top entertaining highlight of the day.

All conference will be available in audio format, so watch the conference web-site for those.

You can see photos here.

Off to day 2 now…

3rd and 4th of October I’m going to Future Of Web Applications conference. Looks like a lot of interesting speakers will be there, and I’m definitely looking forward to hear from John Resig and have few beers on the Diggnation Podcast Live.

The conference is over. It was good. Good presentations, good chat and some good questions and answers, overall – I’m satisfied. On the photo above left to right are me and my colleagues Amy Varga and James Aylett.

The best presentation for me was “One web, Acid2 and CSS3” by Håkon Wium Lie.

On the photo above, Håkon is presenting the “$100 Computer Project” with Opera running on it.

Next weekend I’m on Hack Day London 2007, and will try to create and design something useful and crazy with the Yahoo’s and BBC’s APIs and RSS feeds in on night and one day.

The time is now.
I hope it will live up to my expectations.

I’m going!

On the photo above is Jeffrey Veen from last years @media 2006. I met him in the bar after the conference and said thank you for the brilliant session.

Looking forward to meet more people and talk Web in June this year. See you there.

Visit @media2007.