Future of Web Apps highlights (#fowa)

Posted on 06. Oct, 2009 by benmckenna in Apps, Blog

It’s official, Carsonified‘s excellent Future of Web Apps conference in London chewed me up, spat me out and landed me back in sunny Yorkshire. I’ve had a ball over the three days catching up with some friends and generally talking tech stuff with tech people. Really the only apt way to describe it would be would be “awesome”, which of course  is pronounced “ah-sum”. I was my first time at FOWA, I was desparate to go last year but underestimated the pull of the event and it got sold out from under me. This was of course made worse over the following few weeks as I heard and read so may good things about it. I was massively excited to see what all the fuss is about at 09, so much so that I enrolled in the workshops the day before. There is though, a rather finite amount you can contribute to workshops if you have been on a train since 6am in the morning. I was also planning to do a little live blogging experiment but had a few technical issues, namely the charger being 200 miles away. So yeah, sorry about that too.

Slightly ironically for a web-centric conference though, the wi-fi was a real issue. Ryan Carson promised us “Weapons Grade wi-fi” but sadly I could barely get a connection, either on wi-fi or my iPhone, for the whole two days. There were also some grumbles from those who had been before who objected to the slightly heavy-handed presence of some of the title sponsors Microsoft, Vodafone, Sun and Paypal. It was a great conference though and rather than go through speaker by speaker, theme by theme, I thought I’d just quickly run through some of the highlights for you all.

Francisco Tomalsky, 280North

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications

280North are a fantastic company formed by Francisco Tomalsky and two college friends, all of whome were former employees of Apple and worked on iTunes and iPhone development. You may know 280North’s work, they are the guys responsible for Cappucino, an open source application development framework for developing web applications that look and feel like desktop applications and 280Slides, the presentation software that works in your browser.

Probably one of the stars of the whole show, Tomaskly gave a simultaneous talk and live demo of Atlas, another wonderful Cappuchino tool which makes creating web apps an absolute doddle. Without going into too much detail or giving too much away, if you can resize boxes then you will be able to create web apps in Atlas. The presentation was so well received that they called him back the next day to show everyone more of what Atlas can do.

Bruce Lawson, Opera

The Future of HTML 5

Bruce is a big personality and has a passion for the internet and within seconds of him taking the stage he lets you know it. This was probably the most eagerly anticipated talk of the whole two days with many people staying glued to the good seats through the afternoon interval.

Bruce’s style borders on that of one of my favourite all time comedians, Mark Thomas, and whilst peppered with jokes and witty asides the stuff that he talked us through was pretty mouth watering. HTML 5′s dynamic graphics capabilities alone were worthy of an entire lecture and the demo of the new feature “canvas” took the form of a first person shooter game (ala Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein etc) which impressed the audience. Bruce, claiming claiming he was “not of a militaristic bent” decided to rejig this and instead showed the audience a first person flower giving game instead.  The bad news about canvas is that it isnt yet accessable (for the visually/hearing impared, that is) but it can be worked around if you use .svg graphic formats as the text is still treated as text.

We were told that we should “think of HTML 5 as a broad form, rather like AJAX” rather than like anything that went before. There’s tons and tons of other very cool stuff that HTML5 can do as standard, multiple file uploads, local and session cookie storage, and a wonderful facility to embed (and thus tinker with) video right in the browser window. There will also be no more calling in of javascript libraries to validate forms as they will be automatically validated in 5 and there are also all sorts of nice things like calendar widgets which should make your designer and developer’s lives a lot easier.  Very exciting indeed.

Aza Raskin, Mozilla

How people will use the web in the future

Mozilla are great, firefox is great, all of the add ons are great and rather unsurpisingly Aza’s presentation was great. Rather than talk about specific technology he chose instead to look into the future to see what we should be expecting from our browsing experience. Aza asked us to think of the browser “as a broker of trust, as an insanely smart butler”.

He also intruduced us to Ubiquity, probably the most forward thinking add-on available which acts on an intuitive command system based on wants and requests, Aza took us through the many steps that we go through to do what in reality are small, simple tasks online. Ubiquity is an impressive concept, far too esoteric to describe with any brevity, and Aza probably summed it up best by saying “with google you type what you want to fine, with Ubiquity you type what you want to do”.

Ed Anuff & Mike Malone, Six Apart.

The Future of Social Web Apps

Ed and Mike from Six Apart, the company that brought you Barack Obama’s MyBo social tool, took us through some of the developments around Motion, their new tool for the Movable Type platform and Typepad. Motion promises microblogging features which replicate Pownce, Tumblr or Twitter. Activity streams like FriendFeed and really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect. I also attended the product pitch on this and it’s a really great tool that I’ll be fiddling with in the future.

Bonus video section:

Kevin Rose, Digg

How to get your site from 1 to 1,000,000,000 users

Cnet review of FOWA

Anyway, so with my melon twisted and my mind rammed full of the knowledge of those much smarter than me I headed off into the night and back up north to Yorkshire. But first there was one little thing that I had to settle before I could jump on the train, my little girl had asked me – perfectly reasonably for a two year old I suppose – for a pink dinosaur. The only place I could think of that would even possibly have a pink dinosaur would be the Natural History Museum. I was in luck, one pink dinosaur under my arm it was back off to Kings Cross and the train north.

Thanks to the guys at Carsonified for a great few days.

Tags: API, culturechange, Social, Social Media, tools