Mozilla Hacks

Announcing the winners of the December 2012 Dev Derby!

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Posted on January 25, 2013 in Dev Derby

Last month, some of the most creative web developers out there showed us what they could do with Offline web technologies in the December Dev Derby contest. After looking through the entries, our three judges–Dave Rupert, Eric Shepherd and (filling in for Christian Heilmann this month) yours truly–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 offline Web today.

Dev Derby

The Results

Winners

Runners-up

This was a very exciting contest with some really exceptional results to show for it. Through their incredible work, these contestants have shown the world that we do not need to struggle with poor internet connections at conferences, desperately search for an open network just to work with others, or consume costly data just to play a web-enabled game.

Thanks to these contestants and to everyone else who competed for making the Web a better place.

Want to get a head start on an upcoming Derby? We are now accepting demos related to Drag and Drop (January) and multi-touch (February) and mobile in general (March). Head over to the Dev Derby to get started.

Further Reading

8 comments

  1. Bradley

    Congrats to the winners! I thought that the conference manager was truly amazing when I saw it.

    I have a question, would it be possible to get judges feedback? I worked really hard on my entry (HTML5Notes) and I honestly thought it was pretty good. So I’m just curious about what the judges thought.

    January 26th, 2013 at 11:03

    1. John Karahalis

      Hey Bradley. Thanks for reaching out.

      Thank you also for sharing HTML5Notes–it really is a great demo. It was not a winner because we had trouble getting it to work in Firefox, Firefox Beta or Firefox Aurora. Our rules stipulate that an entry must work in one of those to be eligible.

      To be honest, that policy is probably due for an update. We care about other browsers too, after all. But even if we did update it, I would imagine us strengthening the requirements (e.g., must work in Firefox and one other browser) rather than relaxing them.

      Anyway, if we were mistaken please let me know and I will be sure we re-evaluate. My apologies for the confusion.

      January 26th, 2013 at 11:20

      1. Bradley

        Thanks for the reply.

        I understand, if it didn’t work it didn’t work. Now, I’m a bit surprised about my app not working in Firefox. My main development browser IS Firefox and I developed HTML5Notes using Firefox. I was using the latest version of Firefox at the time (17). It worked for me. I then proceeded to test it in Firefox on a Mac, it worked there too.

        Anyway, at least I have some idea of what happened. Thanks :)

        January 26th, 2013 at 21:11

        1. shavounet

          On Aurora 20 (win7), I found a small bug : if you edit a note without clicking on the validation button and then restart the app (quit & reconnect) the edition is note saved (normal I guess) but you cannot edit it anymore.

          But nice app anyway :)

          January 28th, 2013 at 00:24

        2. John Karahalis

          Thanks for the additional information.

          I did some more research. The demo works correctly at times, but at other times the Error Console reports this message and the New button does not work.

          There are unfortunately some differences between local development environments and our hosted environment that can cause problems. Considering that this is an offline demo and considering that it works some times but not others, I wonder if this could be caused by a key colliding with a key from another demo (see this description of key collisions from Pamela Fox).

          If this is the cause, I would have to apologize. I should have added a warning about this to the contest description.

          Let me know what you discover. Like I said, I really do love the demo, so I want to be sure it gets the attention it deserves one way or another.

          January 30th, 2013 at 12:08

          1. Bradley

            That’s it. It’s because I was trying to load values made by one of the other apps from local storage.

            I should have put a unique string in front of my id’s (which were numeric). I had discovered that myself, but I didn’t think much of it because I knew that wasn’t a problem when it is hosted on it’s own domain. I didn’t think through the fact that it would be up on the same domain with the other entries (which means they would be thrown in the same section of local storage). So in the end, technically my fault as I didn’t do the absolute best practice.

            Thanks for the update John :)

            January 30th, 2013 at 13:14

          2. John Karahalis

            Glad to hear you were able to determine the cause. I am sorry, though, that this prevented the demo from working properly. I could have done a better job pointing this out in the contest description.

            I published a Tweet about HTML5Notes to help generate the buzz it deserves. Better yet, since you did such a great job making it mobile friendly, I have added it as a submission to the March Derby. It will be judged alongside new entries. At the same time, you are free to make any improvements you want and submit a new version before the March contest ends.

            Thanks again for the awesome work!

            February 5th, 2013 at 11:09

  2. Beben Koben

    congrats…
    Keep on to creativity :D

    January 28th, 2013 at 09:26

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