Sean Delaney

On March 6th 2009 I went to the Future of Web Apps in Dublin!  It was held at the Liberty Hall in Dublin city centre.

FOWA’s has never came to Ireland before so this was the first event of its kind.  There was a good line-up of talented and expert speakers to entertain the crowd:

• Ryan Carson from Carsonified
• Blaine Cooke ex Twitter & Yahoo!  Brickhouse
• David Heinemeier Hansson from 37 signals & Ruby on Rails
• Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django web framework
• Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK

I met some really inspiring people such as Lee Munroe and got to see some great talks.  The highlight of the day for me was Simon Willison who gave a very entertaining, scary and educational talk about website security issues and kinda opened my eyes to a few things.

The biggest disappointment with the event was the tiny social spaces available and complete lack of free refreshments.   This meant that everyone disbanded during the breaks and unless you already knew people there were very very limited networking opportunities which wasnt good for my freelance career and making new friends, although I did hand out a few business cards!

However, in true FOWA style the event was followed by a few drinks and an after party!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kncmRMEakPU

I’m looking forward to FOWA returning next year.

A Sliverlight development team have come up witj a hack to allow Microsoft Windows Media Player to run inside Google’s fledgling browser, Google Chrome.

The hack to Silverlight lets Microsoft’s player detect Chrome, clearing the way to playing audio and video and consists of three lines added to Silverlight.supportedUserAgent.js, which is used to check for browser compatibility and that means Chrome can be recognized by Silverlight.

However, the Silverlight program manager Tim Heuer has stated that this is early code and Chrome is not officially supported by Silverlight.

“We continue to evaluate the browser support matrix for Silverlight and before you ask - no decisions have been made just yet to change the current supported matrix.”

The Silverlight hack for Chrome demonstrates that these projects are the willingness of corporations to commit time and resources to making software run in Microsoft’s rivals’ runtime enivornments.

Absolutely frickin’ awesome!

Just RIDE it.