Win a ticket to Web Directions South!
By Chris Mills. Wednesday, 30. September 2009, 08:15:14
One of the most exciting conferences of the year is almost upon us, web friends. The Web Directions South conference in Sydney Australia, part of Australian Web Week, is running from October 6-9 and promises a wealth of interesting and informative talks on everything from Web Fonts and SEO to Canvas programming and developer tools.
Opera running wild in Australia
Opera has a long history of supporting Web Directions events, and this year is no different. We are sponsoring the main conference, and giving numerous talks throughout the week:
- I am attending the main Web Directions South conference, co-hosting the Ed Directions education workshop, and speaking at WE Rock, WebJam and Ignite Sydney. Phew!
- Lachlan Hunt is giving Opera's point of view on the
State of the Web as a Platform
panel - Daniel Davis is turning up to meet a lot of new faces, talk the talk and walk the walk, and generally be sociable. He is dedicating a lot of his time to working on Widgets, so should be able to answer any questions you have on those
We are all looking forward to having some great conversations, so come up and talk to us!
Competition time
Ok, here's some exciting news - Opera have a free ticket for the main Web Directions South conference going spare, and we are offering it up as a competition prize.
To get a chance to win, all you have to do is submit an abstract detailing what you would do to showcase the new breed of web standards - CSS 3, HTML 5, SVG, etc. Give us at the minimum some sketches, mockups, etc, and a couple of paragraphs of description, and submit your entry by 23.58 GMT Sunday October the 4th. You can post it on your blog (or in a Google doc, perhaps) and give us the URL below in the comments.
We will then judge the competition and announce the winner on Monday October the 5th.
The only condition is that the showcase idea must work in Opera 10. The winner will be invited to write up their showcase as an article to be published on the dev.opera.com front page!
The winner will get their name put down for a free ticket at the door of WDS (please note that we are only supplying the free ticket, not paying for travel costs!)
WIDGETIZE
Guillermo # 30. September 2009, 13:59
what if the showcase is really, really, reaaaaally mind blowing?
Chris Mills # 30. September 2009, 17:08
Originally posted by Guille:
Depends. Try me ;-)
Guillermo # 30. September 2009, 20:52
We present to the user a 3D sound interface showing the hierarchy and position of a web page's elements. So the user will listen the page's content from his location on a tree-dimensional space and will be able to interact with it by using the mouse, keyboard, or any other suitable technology.
One of our main objectives was to make it platform and OS independent. So our solution was to develop a plug-in that uses NPAPI, and by using userJS connects itself to the browser and get information about the page that is being displayed (element's position, semantic structure, mouse position, DOM changes, and so on), process that information and present it to the user using 3D sound.
We are finishing the technical investigation phase with virtually every technical problem solved, and we are looking forward to advance to the development phase soon.
You can see a HTML version of Tiressias's paper (Sadly, it is on Spanish only). Tiressias is the project's name).
This project has been presented on the CakeFest 2008 on Buenos Aires, on the CNEISI 2008 and 2009 (CNEISI is a national congress of system engineers). It was elected as the best investigation project of System Engineer on Argentina at CNEISI 2009. (we used Opera to showcase Tiressias on all presentations).
Chris Mills # 5. October 2009, 19:49
You have won the competition, but we can't really afford to pay for your travel over to Australia, I'm afraid. We will have to send you something as a momento!
I would love to read up more about this project. Would you be prepared to help me put together an article about it? We could blog it somewhere, and get some more exposure for your project. It sounds really innovative, and I'm sure others would be interested in finding out more about it.