Webinars Articles

Update 2011-12-20: The video recording of this webinar is now available:

IndexedDB is the emerging standard for structured client-side data storage. The IndexedDB standard is supported by current versions of Firefox and Chrome, and support for it is expected in Internet Explorer 10.

With this growing maturity and support, it’s time to start experimenting with what IndexedDB can do for Web applications. Working with IndexedDB requires a shift in mindset for many Web developers, as it is more similar to “NoSQL” systems like CouchDB or MongoDB than to traditional relational databases.

IndexedDB will be the theme for December’s MDN DevDerby. And to kick off the theme for the month, on December 1st, we’re offering an MDN Webinar on IndexedDB with Jonas Sicking, one of the editors of the IndexedDB draft standard and one of the implementors of IndexedDB in Gecko.

When

December 1st, at 9:00 a.m. US Pacific Time (17:00 UTC). Add this event to your Google calendar:

Where

Air Mozilla, with text chat on #airmozilla on irc.mozilla.org. (There’s an IRC widget on the Air Mozilla page if you need it.)

We’ll record this session for those who can’t attend (or can’t use Flash, which is currently used by Air Mozilla for live streaming video).

We’d like to get a rough estimate of how many people will be attending. If you happen to use Plancast, and you plan to attend the seminar, please join the event on Plancast.

Update 2011-11-10: Video of this webinar is now available:

You can download the code that Rob demos in the webinar.

You might also check out the recording of the webinar created by BigBlueButton. It syncs the audio with the slides and chat window using Popcorn.js. On the downside, BBB starts recording as soon as anyone joins the conference audio bridge, which in this case happened an hour before the webinar started. Fast-forward to time 58:20 for the start of the webinar.

Please join us on Tuesday, November 8th at 17:00 UTC (convert to your local time) for a webinar on using the Canvas API, with our own Rob Hawkes, author of Foundation HTML5 Canvas.

Canvas is the topic for the November Dev Derby. Rob is planning to show how to make an image editor for avatars using Canvas. Spark your imagination with the webinar, create some new and amazing use of Canvas, and submit it to the Dev Derby.

We will use BigBlueButton for web-conferencing, and will avoid using the feature that led to the server problems with the September webinar. We will be recording the session, and I promise to double- and triple-check the recording set-up in advance :-)

Add this event to your calendar:

We’d like to get a rough estimate of how many people will be attending. If you happen to use Plancast, and you plan to attend the seminar, please join the event on Plancast.

To join the webinar:

1. Go to the BigBlueButton server for Mozilla.
2. For Full Name, enter your name.
3. Select “Mozilla Developer Network” in the Room list.
4. For Password, enter MDNHacks.

Note: Big Blue Button uses Flash, so make sure you have the latest version installed, especially if you are running Mac OS X Lion.

Update 2011-09-09: Oh noes! We had a double dose of technical difficulties during this webinar. The BigBlueButton server froze and required a couple of reboots to get it working. It worked fine for the remainder of the session. Thanks to those who stuck around, and apologies to everyone for the problem.

On top of that, we had another recording failure. That is, we have a recording, but it has no audio. And as Remy demoed code rather than slides, there are no slides to share. We can post the recording if there’s interest, but it’s sadly lacking Remy’s narration. Double apologies for that.

Please join us on on Friday, September 9th at 16:00 UTC (convert to your local time), for a webinar on the Geolocation API, with Remy Sharp. Remy is well-known in web development circles, and was one of the first folks interviewed for our People of HTML5 series.

Geolocation is the topic for the September Dev Derby. Remy has indicated that this session will be light on slides and heavy on code, so get ready for some meaty stuff! Then whip up an awesome way to use geolocation and submit it to the Dev Derby.

Once again, we’re using BigBlueButton, thanks to Blindside Networks. (The recording issues with last month’s webinar were independent of BBB.)

Add this event to your calendar:

We’d like to get a rough estimate of how many people will be attending. If you happen to use Plancast and you expect to attend the webinar, please join the event on Plancast.

To join the webinar:

1. Go to the BigBlueButton server for Mozilla.
2. For Full Name, enter your name.
3. Select “Mozilla Developer Network” in the Room list.
4. For Password, enter MDNHacks.

Note: Big Blue Button uses Flash, so make sure you have the latest version installed, especially if you are running Mac OS X Lion.

We are planning to record the webinar and make it available for those who can’t attend to view later.

Update 2011-08-19: We had intended to record this webinar and make it available for those who couldn’t attend. Due to a convergence of technical difficulties, the recording was not successful. Apologies for failing on that promise. You can see Syd’s slides and a recording of a similar talk Syd gave at the Heart & Sole conference earlier this year.

On Thursday, August 18th at 16:00 UTC, the latest installment of the MDN webinar series will be presented by Syd Lawrence, on the topic of using the History API to make AJAX sites more friendly. The History API is also the topic for the August DevDerby and this week’s Ask MDN session on Twitter (which Syd will also be helping out with). So you can get your head full of History API know-how, whip up an amazing History API demo, and submit it for the DevDerby!

Syd Lawrence is a freelance front-end web developer, living in Winchester UK, who speaks at a variety of conferences and is also a part-time lecturer at Winchester University in digital media development.

This is the third MDN webinar, and our third experiment in webinar technology. This time around, we’re using BigBlueButton, an open-source web-conferencing system (thanks to our friends at Blindside Networks). It was used for the Knight-Mozilla News (MoJo) Learning Lab in July, and worked pretty well for that. Since it’s open source, if there’s something about it you don’t like, you can do something about it.

Add this event to your calendar:

To join the webinar:

1. Go to the BigBlueButton server for Mozilla.
2. For Full Name, enter your name.
3. Select “Mozilla Developer Network” in the Room list.
4. For Password, enter MDNHacks.

Note: Big Blue Button uses Flash, so make sure you have the latest version installed, especially if you are running Mac OS X Lion.

Update 2011-07-20: The video recording of this webinar is now available:

On Thursday, July 14th, at 16:00 UTC, Chris Heilmann will give second in the (so far sporadic) Mozilla Developer Engagement webinar series, discussing syncing HTML5 video with Google maps, using his “Spirit of Indiana Jones” demo as an example. Chris has already blogged about this demo, so this webinar is a chance for you to take part in a conversation, rather than just receive a broadcast.

Take a look at the demo code and the blog post, and then bring your questions to the webinar session. If you have a Google account, you can post questions (or respond to others’) ahead of time in this Google Moderator series; if not, ask your questions in IRC during the session.

The webinar will be broadcast on Air Mozilla, with text chat on #airmozilla on irc.mozilla.org. (There’s an IRC widget on the Air Mozilla page if you need it.)

Add this webinar to your calendar:

Oh, by the way, HTML5 video is the theme of the Mozilla Dev Derby for July. Whether you’re new to working with HTML5 video or an “old pro” (if there is such a thing), submit a demo during July to show off your stuff and win cool prizes.

If you’ve been around the software industry for a little while, you’ve probably attended at least a few “webinars”, where someone does an online presentation, which you can watch and listen to in real time. You might be able to ask questions via a chat window, and if you’re lucky, the presenter will select your question to answer in the very limited time allocated for audience questions. If you can’t make it to the real-time presentation, you can watch a recording later, but you miss out on the Q&A.

The Mozilla Developer Engagement team is experimenting with a slightly different approach to presenting webinars. We’re decoupling the presentation part from the Q&A part. Instead of a real-time presentation with a little bit of Q&A, we’re publishing a screencast, and scheduling time for online chat about it later.

You can view the screencast on your own time, as much as you need to, and peruse and play with the code under discussion. Then, for those who have questions, the presenter will be on IRC during scheduled times to discuss them. You’ll also be able to chat with other participants, which usually isn’t possible in a typical webinar.

Here is the first in an intended series of pseudo-webinars: Christian Heilmann talking about syncing page content with HTML5 video.

The screencast

The chats

Discussion of this screencast will take place in the #mdnlearning channel on irc.mozilla.org at the following times:

• 10:00 UTC, Monday, 21 March
• 19:00 UTC, Monday, 21 March

If you don’t have an IRC client installed (such as the Chatzilla add-on for Firefox), you can access the #mdnlearning channel via this Mibbit widget.

We picked the times for the chat sessions to cover as many time zones as possible. We know they won’t be ideal for everybody. Please let us know in the comments how much lead time you’d like between publishing screencasts and the scheduled chats.

The code

The code that Chris demos in the screencast is available at https://github.com/codepo8/Syncing-Video.