Mozilla Hacks

Announcing the November Dev Derby winners!

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Posted on December 21, 2012 in Dev Derby

Last month, some of the most creative web developers out there showed us what they could do with the Fullscreen API in the November Dev Derby contest. After looking through the entries, our three expert judges–Christian Heilmann, Dave Rupert and Eric Shepherd–decided on three winners and two runners-up.

Not a contestant? There are other reasons to be excited. Most importantly, all of these demos are completely open-source, making them wonderful lessons in the exciting things you can do with the Fullscreen API today.

Dev Derby

The Results

Winners

Runners-up

This was a challenging contest to be sure. After all, what’s so great about taking over the entire screen? Our contestants provided some surprising answers. Fullscreen web applications mean immersive storytelling, engaging education, beautiful projection and more.

Congratulations to these winners and to everyone who competed. The Web is a more exciting place thanks to their work.

Want to get a head start on an upcoming Derby? We are now accepting demos related to offline web technologies (December), and Drag and Drop (January) and multi-touch (February). Head over to the Dev Derby to get started.

Further reading

4 comments

  1. David Mulder

    No offense, but I think that Church Web Presenter should have won this competition by a large large margin. It’s the *only* demo in the list which actually uses the fullscreen functionality in such a way, which is *not* possible without the API. (And nope, I didn’t participate in this contest, nor do I have any affiliation with Marc Castles… it’s just that all other demo’s are just normal sites and demos… but fullscreen)

    December 22nd, 2012 at 02:37

    1. John Karahalis

      Thanks for sharing your thoughts, David.

      Entries are judged across four different dimensions: technology, originality, aesthetics and practicality. The judges gave Church Web Presenter very good scores for originality and practicality, and good score for technology, but a relatively low score for aesthetics.

      The judges mentioned having some trouble getting Church Web Presenter to work. For example, it appears there is a bug in the “stage display” feature related to a missing file.

      At the end of the day, I really feel that Church Web Presenter is a wonderful demo that deserves a huge amount of praise and attention. Winning third place in the Dev Derby is no small accomplishment.

      December 22nd, 2012 at 13:04

      1. David Mulder

        What I wonder about in that case: Are originality and technology about the relevant technology only or in general? Because for example the first place uses the fullscreen API in a totally unoriginal way. The full screen API in only the most simple technological way possible… and it’s totally unpractical, because one isn’t supposed to go fullscreen without good reason (and showing beautiful slides isn’t a good reason as far as I know). It really seems that those criteria are judged in general then… which doesn’t make sense, because then the competition isn’t about the fullscreen API (which is what you guys seem to claim), but it’s actually about the most interesting demo all round which somewhere (even if it’s in a hidden corner) implements the full screen API. Oh well, the point I am trying to make is simply that the way the demos were judged by your description sounds really bad… in that case let’s forfeit the specific technology criteria alltogether and make it an open demo competition… (please don’t, but if that’s the way those demo’s are judged either way, then why bother…)

        Btw, just to be fair here, I love the Dev Derby’s and with a fair number of technologies the winner really had the all round best application of the specific technology… but once in awhile with ‘vaguer’ technologies like the fullscreen API or the geolocation API none or nearly none of the demo’s are able to show the added value of the specific API/technology… and I seem to remember that in the very beginning the idea of the dev derby’s was to highlight the possibilities and advantages of new technologies. So based on that I would suggest that a thing like practicality and technology should be on an entirely different scale of importance than something like aesthetics. Or take a criterium like originality, originality is only a good thing if practicality is high, but if practicality is low, then originality is practically irrelevant. (Btw, I have been doing too much weighted intelligent ranking lately… so ach :P )

        Oh well, the fact that that file is missing in the presenter demo is a bit of a killer which does justify to a great extend that he didn’t win first place (I assumed it to be only a temporary problem on my computer)… but I hope you also understand where I am coming from when I say that the first and second place actually hold little value in the light of this specific competition (not sure in what kind of competition the first would deserve to win, but the second would definitely belong in the top of a webgl competition I suppose… it’s not suddenly a great fullscreen API demo because you can make a single element on screen go full screen)

        December 22nd, 2012 at 17:49

  2. John Karahalis

    The four dimensions are judged both with regard to the technology of the month and in general. The technology of the month is not judged exclusively because we feel that a winning demo should be very impressive holistically (very original, very well-designed, and so on) in addition to making very good use of the technology of the month.

    If we dropped dimensions like practicality and aesthetics and considered only how the technology was used, you could imagine the Dev Derby becoming more of an academic platform, filled with technologically exciting but otherwise bland code examples. This is not our goal.

    Our goal is instead to demonstrate to developers and users everywhere that new open Web technologies can be used to create experiences that are not only technologically exciting but also useful and beautiful.

    The judges felt that all of the winners did a great job of balancing the four dimensions, but that the first and second place winners did this best.

    edit: Just wanted to add that I greatly appreciate your feedback. While I feel that the current weighting of the dimensions works very well, I agree that revisiting the weighting should not be out of the question. I will talk with some colleagues about this discussion to decide if we should change anything.

    December 26th, 2012 at 16:38

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