Etech Audience, originally uploaded by x180.

First Carsten Bormann on ‘A Disconnection-tolerant AJAX library’ followed by Steve Yan on ‘Web Apps without the Web’.
Carsten demonstrated his work so far on ‘Panic-mode’, his library for dealing with frequently connected computing and AJAX on the Web. As part of his presentation he walked through best practices for AJAX development. A few elements I took note of – updating location.hash to support bookmarking, keeping cookies below 4kb for best results and using cookies or flash 8 local storage to deal with browser crashes.

Steve Yan demonstrated his latest work on Num Sum and TrimJunction. Num Sum is a Web based spreadsheet application and TrimJunction is a port of RoR into Javascript. In terms of pushing technical boundaries, I think Steve might have my vote for tops of Etech 2006. The way he’s created an implementation of SQL using Javascript (and that’s just the start) blew my mind. Steve’s work was a great follow up to Carsten’s in that he demonstrated how a user could ‘Save As’ (using normal browser file menu) the Web spreadsheet to the local filesystem, work on it offline, then resync it later when reconnected to the network. Very powerful and user friendly stuff. By writing your Web app using TrimJunction, the promise is that you get write once, run everywhere (client or server).

Julian Bleeker was next – speaking on ‘Pervasive Electronic Games’. I’ve often wished I had more time to spend hacking on next gen mobile games, so it was great to get an overview of what has been going on in this space over the past year. Given that everyone seems to have a camera phone these days I’ve got to think if there is any low hanging fruit to trial in Toronto. Julian mentioned a few interesting games using photo capabilities – one whereby users power up by scanning bar codes, another whereby users gain points by scanning others photos and having others scan theirs (pyramid scheme). Lots of examples of ‘hide and seek’ – especially under the geocaching banner. The whole audience then got to participate in a trial – everyone dialed in and using their keypads controlled their own character (shape) on screen. Julian’s push is to get people engaged in way that doesn’t leave them staring at their tiny mobile screen but rather up and connecting with others. I scribbled down a quote from Julian today that I thought was great – “In my world nothing is ever done. Everything is an iteration.”

Yahoo presented later in the morning – showcasing their vision for the future of search (it’s social). “Better search through people”. Bradley Horowitz walked the crowd through the Yahoo acquisitions of recent – and in the process highlighted some of the special things that are changing the way content is created. As an example, instead of users explicitly ranking photos in flickr so that the system can determine interestingness, the ranking is created implicitly by storing details of regular usage and traffic patterns. While not entirely new, I don’t think this approach is ubiquitous yet. If I can take one idea away from the Yahoo presentation for implementation in my own group – that would be that of Yahoo’s ‘Hack Day’ where all staff are given a day to build on top of their existing products to spur innovation.

After Yahoo was Mark Hunt – debuting his new application gootodo. This might have been the ‘longest’ presentation I saw during the conference – why Mark ended up with almost an hour of time where we had other presenters being cut off after 15 minutes I don’t understand. As I’d already listened to the GTD audio book, it seemed like Mark was basically giving David Allen’s speech. And even though we were experiencing network difficulties (as we did all week – the capactiy just wasn’t adequate for the size of the group), when Mark did have connectivity he seemed hesitant to dive into the application. At certain points I wanted to run up to the front of the room and login him in myself so that we could finally get a look at what he’s come up with. To be fair, when Mark finally did show us the application – he had implemented some really great ideas. One such idea was the ability to add to-dos using email, including the ability to postdate to-dos into the future using different system email address (eg. tuesday@gootodo.com). Very clever and effective.

After lunch Scott Berkun was up – someone who I really wanted to see after I’d purchased his book on project management and started following his blog. His session was focused on user interface design (not project management) and elicited lots of debate. Some key ideas Scott presented – we are creating a mashup matrix on the Web right now but it is mostly data centric not user centric, human memory is expensive and we shouldn’t bloat up our requirements, and in many of the mapping mashups we are putting emphasis on the map for the cool factor even though the tabular data is more important to the user. Scott dissected a couple case studies as part of his presentation – one of Edward Tufte‘s diagrams (as the crowd contained lots of Web/HCI folk they were familiar with the work) and also the Tag Cloud from the O’Reilly Radar website. With each he dissected the implementation and recommended a course for analysis and improvement. For each case, at least a half dozen audience members took to defending the existing design and questioning Scott’s reasoning. Entertaining and very illustrative of the challenges that we face when doing interface design everyday.

Last up, and the end of my blogging for a few days at least ;>, was Jason and Danny from the EFF. They went over 10 possible cases we might see in the next couple years – ‘RIAA vs. ?’ was, as to be expected, one of them. The guys were really entertaining – I now understand just how important the work is that they are doing out there.

So that’s it. Stick a fork in Etech 2006. Probably the most interesting conference I’ve attended to date – I’ll really be trying to make it back for 2007.