Last weekend I was in New York City to speak at the GothamJS conference and Mozilla also sponsored it. It was a nice event with about 200 attendees, taking place in the NYIT Auditorium on Broadway.

The event was one-track with 8 speakers, and personally I always prefer when it’s just one track for follow-up discussions and that everyone have seen and heard the same thing. The topics were ranging broadly between script loaders and HTML5 in one end, and voice-controlled telephony applications in the other.

My presentation

My talk was about HTML5 APIs in general, to give an introduction to them but also to inspire people to try things out and also give feedback to both working groups and web browser vendors about current implementations.

Slides can also be downloaded at SlideShare.

Additionally to the APIs covered in my London Ajax Mobile Event presentation, I went through Web Sockets, File API, HTML5 video, canvas and WebGL. Also, if you are more interested in the <canvas> element, my colleague Rob Hawkes recently released the Foundation HTML5 Canvas book.

What I especially liked talking about is services like vid.ly which helps you take control over the problem of different video codec support in different web browsers, by storing various formats and then deliver the most suitable one depending on the web browser/device accessing it.

Another favorite is Universal Subtitles, which is an excellent tool for everyone to be able to add subtitles to a video clip, empowering users with varying language skills to take part of a video and its content and sharing it with the world.

An option to make the content of a web site richer, there is Popcorn.js to sync key events in the video playing to what kind of text or other information you want to present to go with that. To complement that, the Butterapp is an editor to create that kind of content syncing, currently in alpha.

I also mentioned videograbber for taking easy video screenshots in the web browser.

Dev Derby <video> challenge

I also want to take the opportunity to remind you that Mozilla Dev Derby has a challenge for what you can accomplish with the <video> that goes till the end of July, so please submit anything if you have a good idea!