Web On The Piste - Post 1 - The Web Jam

This is the first in a series of posts that I plan to do on the recent Web On The Piste conference that took place in Queenstown.

Scott did a great job on the weekend introducing the two C's rule for RIA (worth reading if you haven't already). I would go as far as adding a third C to the mix "concept".

This way we end with "Concept", "Content" and "Context" and Scott's statement that Context is King, Content just fuels Context.

Now let me put this into "context" ;) for the WOTP conference.

On the second day keynote Thomas Burleson of Universal Mind showed a concept (prototype) RIA application that they created for the San Francisco police to geocode crime and police and even sync in video from the bonnet of the patrol cars. It was a nice concept but that fact that the video that played was of a "famous police chase" made the audience aware that this was a "concept" application.

In contrast the Live team at Microsoft has released Contoso Bike Club, as part of the overall Windows Live Quick Apps:  The "bike cam" demo on the Thames River synchronizes the video with the map display on the route via captured GPS data placed as metadata into the WMV stream and scripted through the Silverlight player. This is better IMO as it provides real data (content) and some context.

Better still was the "What I did in Auckland" session that won the webjam at WOTP.

Tom Link (also of Universal Mind) took this all one step further by showed the equipment he used to collect "real data" (the GPS watch, his camera), he then showed an actual path, photos and replay of his time in Auckland that had occurred only days before.

The difference for me is that Thomas showed a Concept, Contose Bikes took it one step further and provided Content (GPS route data sync'd with real video and source code) and Tom nailed it with Context. You may disagree w/ me but IMO this is why Tom won.

I think the lesson for Andrew and myself here is that we both took "features" for our webjam demos and tried to "retrofit content and context" into the presentations. Andrew chose LOB, data visualization and offline support (through Google gears). I chose video brush, designer/ developer workflow and Silverlight web integration.

The other lesson I have to take away is "operator error"... I didn't record all of the web jam sorry! I forgot to press record in part and I ran out of tape in other parts. I missed my own jam session completely!

Nonetheless here is what I've got!

Oh yeah and since I didn't record my JAM I took the liberty to do a screen cast of the extended version (why because I can!). On the day my 3 mins finished with me hitting F5 and running the video w/ rounded corners and reflection in the browser (just like you see below). In the following screen cast I have added, mouse click events in javascript for full screen support and also packaging and uploading the finished application into silverlight streaming in the cloud. The screen cast is 8 minutes long and I have sped up the video slightly so that it remains punchy!

The other thing I was interested in from the Webjam was Robin's quick fire presentation on the Model View Controller pattern. I am always interested in the MVC v MVP debates that crop up between "purists" at web conferences so I thought I'd link to a couple of articles that I like that describe the differences (similarities) between the two patterns... From a Flash dev side, from an MS Dev side...

If you were at the webjam at WOTP you would have seen the "high-def" video background of NZL14 sailing across the lake in Queenstown... I have added this to BackgroundMotion an open source community site put together by the team at Mindscape you might be interested in their view on MVP.

Enjoy!