DevCon5 — on learning from games, Monty Sharma, Mass Unity

Posted on November 28, 2012 by

Monty Sharma gave a great talk this morning at DevCon5 about the current trends in games and what the rest of us can learn from them. He centers on three big ideas:

  • Free-to-Play. Find a way to let dedicated users pay more to get more stuff, but offer free functionality to everybody who asks
  • Compulsion Loops. Find ways to get people hooked into coming back to your software in order to satisfy some compulsion
  • Engaged Communities. Give up some control to bring your users into a community with one another.

I was really interested in his retelling of the EVE Online community responding to something called GoonSwarm. I can’t quite follow the internal politics of the game, but I can see that thousands of users organized themselves into highly effective ad hoc groups in order to battle one another within the game. Are your users that passionate and engaged?

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jsEverywhere: Apathy is the Enemy of Awesome by Nancy Lyons

Posted on October 26, 2012 by

Nancy Lyons of geekgirlsguide gives a real end-of-day pep talk about how failed communication and collaboration can kill projects. I’ll put in a few of her zingers and how I understand them:

  • Learn how to talk about what you do to people who have no idea what you’re talking about.

Her evangelical zeal is very refreshing; I can imagine her listening to all these tech talks and thinking, “none of this is going to save you if your team can’t talk to each other.”

  • Don’t drop truth bombs

She urges us to imagine what non-technical clients who haven’t thought about iterations and known bugs will hear when you talk about bugs.

  • Don’t define scope in a consulting proposal

Instead, define the requirements collaboratively alongside the client. You have no idea what you’re talking about when you start!

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jsEverywhere: PhoneGap CLI and PhoneGap Build Steve Gill, Adobe

Posted on October 26, 2012 by

Steve Gill is demoing “Cordova Client”, in which you have command-line tools to build, deploy, and manage Cordova-based applications on Blackberry, Android, and iOS. This is still in beta. It’s at github.com/filmaj/cordova-client. It requires Node.js, should be available in npm.

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jsEverywhere: From Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery by Morten Nielsen

Posted on October 26, 2012 by

Morten‘s presentation is a hilarious, compelling fable of what happens when a .NET shop relying on manual processes becomes a victim of its own success and ends up with an exploding number of software versions in the field. The fable ends happily using Hudson and Jenkins for repeatable, automated deployments. Whew.

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jsEverywhere: End-to-End W3C APIs by Alexandre Morgaut

Posted on October 26, 2012 by

Alexandre is giving a great overview of the history of JavaScript, popular API’s, and the role of W3C and other standards bodies. He gives a shoutout to Kevin Dangoor for CommonJS, then proposes the idea that remote CommonJS processes can be thought of as remote Web Workers. Wakanda makes big use of CommonJS.

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jsEverywhere: Single Page Applications, Josh Powell

Posted on October 26, 2012 by

Josh Powell is giving a great talk about how to make single page web applications with JavaScript. The main focus is on how to break free of the web 1.0 tyranny of doing a page load for every new piece of content. He says his big AHA moment was to hang a handler off the jQuery hashchange() function; this lets you put a router on your client side; you can show different content based on the value after the hash without page loads, and your browser history buttons will work properly. Cool stuff.

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Firefox Aurora Marketplace for Android available now

Posted on October 26, 2012 by

Earlier this month, Mozilla announced the Firefox Aurora Marketplace release. We’re hoping that Aurora users, our awesome early adopters, will go experience the Firefox Marketplace on their Android phones and let us know what they think.

Our goal is to collect as much real-life feedback as possible about the Marketplace’s design, usability, performance, reliability, and content. Feedback from early adopters helps us enhance the quality of the Marketplace before it is released to larger audiences.

The developers we’ve talked to so far are excited to be listed in the Firefox Marketplace when it opens. They’re creating great app experiences with the Web technologies they’ve already mastered. They’re getting timely and thoughtful critiques from our Marketplace app reviewers.

In addition to being a cool site, Firefox Marketplace also offers APIs for app submission, payments, and app discovery. Like everything Mozilla does, this ecosystem is always open — users have choices and developers have control over their content, functionality and distribution.

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) and the DevHub contain extensive documentation, FAQs and emulation tools to help you get started building your App.

We need your feedback, and we need your Apps! Get Firefox Aurora for Android, learn about the Marketplace, and post your Apps to the Firefox Marketplace.

keep rockin’ the free web,
-Bill

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