MIX '11 — Day 0

by Aaron

Today was bootcamp day with the conference proper starting tomorrow. I went to two sessions: HTML5 and jQuery.

HTML5

  • Stephanie Rewis talked about HTML 5, CSS 3 and assorted JavaScript APIs (geolocation, web workers, local storage, etc.).
  • Dive into HTML5 felt like it covered a lot of the same material (... which isn't that surprising given that both the book and the talk are introductions to HTML 5).
  • Modernizr, When can I use..., and html5shim all got shout outs.

jQuery

  • Some dude from Microsoft talked about jQuery. I don't really feel like it covered any new ground as far as I was concerned and I think it overlooked one key feature: docs.jquery.com. jQuery is easily one of the best documented projects around and that is part of what makes it so great.
  • Event delegation is important as binding/unbinding hundreds or thousands of event listeners can be expensive.
  • jQuery.live() is still awesome. .live() is a feature I learnt about way back in 2009 at StackOverflow Dev Days... but it came up in this talk and it is still awesome.
  • I'm a little excited about jQuery Mobile. Of course, I haven't actually used a whole lot of jQuery UI and I'm a little nervous about the whole "Let's make it look like an iPhone!" thing that's going on.

Evening Sessions

  • I ate a ridiculously large steak. It was delicious.
  • I went to see Penn & Teller. As a fan of Bullshit!, it was really cool to see them perform live. There was more magic and (only very slightly) less pontification.