SXSWi: The Aftermath Roundup

The SXSWi 2012 festival is over, and the merry men and women of Opera have returned to their castles, caves and dungeons. We didn't have much of a chance during our visit to Austin to write intermediate reports and post interviews, as we were far too busy meeting great people, spreading the good word of Opera, and rocking out. So in lieu of what was promised in my previous post about SXSWi, here is a summary of our talks including links to slides and other resources associated with them, and some highlights.

SXSWi highlights

We really liked the following:

  • The choice of beer at The Gingerman
  • The free beer in the SXSWi tradeshow
  • Talking to so many Opera fans in the good old US of A.
  • The beer and food in the Ironworks (a pattern emerging here)
  • Having a chance to talk to so many talented developers and designers and spread the good word of open standards and best practices!
  • Checking out some awesome bands (I got my metal fix in Austin)

Opera talks FTW

Overall, our talks went really well — all of them seemed to have good turnouts, and good comments. In short, I think we kicked some ass at SXSWi! Below you will find talk summaries and links to resource for each talk.

Leaving Flatland: Getting Started with WebGL, featuring Luz Caballero

Luz and talk partner Nicolas Garcia Belmonte delivered a very interesting intro to WebGL, talking about what browsers support it, when you should use it, and what you can do with it. This was accompanied by some really cool visualization demos.

The State of Browser Developer Tools, featuring Mike Taylor

In this talk, the rock 'n' roll Mr Mike Taylor teamed up with representatives from other browser vendors to discuss new debugging features from browser vendors like Google, Opera and Firefox. I think he held his own nicely against the likes of Paul Irish and Brendan Eich, providing a witty and informative presence for Opera.

HTML5 and CSS3: Does Now Really Mean Now?, by Chris Mills

I was very pleased with the reception my talk got: I provided some tips for using HTML5 and CSS3 shiny, while keeping content accessible and usable in older browsers via polyfills, feature detection, and more. I raced through my talk pretty quickly, but the ample time I had for questions was productive, eliciting lots of useful questions and comments. I had around 200 positive tweets afterwards ;-)

Building Great Games in HTML5, by Erik Möller

Erik is a truly great programmer, and his work inside Opera on WebGL really shows off some of his knowledge from his past life in the games industry. In this talk, he shared some of his <canvas>, WebGL and COLLADA knowledge for creating web-based games, to a great reception.

Browser Wars V: The Angry Birds Era, featuring Charles McCathie Nevile

Chaals got together with the equivalent open standards divas from Mozilla, Microsoft and Google to talk about big issues of the day, such as DRM in browsers for video, the move towards supporting -webkit- prefixes in non-WebKit browsers, and the controversy of Google products such as DASH. It was fun and informative, but surprisingly less controversial than previous year's browser wars panels.

CSS.next: Current Experiments, CSS4 and the Future, featuring Divya Manian

The assembled team of CSS experts discussed where CSS is at now, how you can use some of the existing features to do great things, and where it will go in the future. This generated a lot of great discussion!

Lie to Me: CSS3 Demystified, by Håkon Wium Lie

Our CTO gave a presentation on CSS, looking at where it is going, some of the killer new features introduced in the CSS3 modules (such as web fonts and paged media), and historical context on how we got to where we are. It was delivered in a fun, lighthearted way that was accessible to non-CSS experts.

Feel free to ask us questions on Twitter, or comment on this post!