Chrome and HTML5 at Moscow Google Developer Day 2010

Continuing from the previous post, we move on to look at presentations from local Chrome and HTML5 developers at the Moscow Developer Day.

HTML5

Opera's Vadeem Makeev, from St. Petersburg, entertained the crowd with a CSS3 progressive enhancement demo. Beginning with a very ordinary looking arrangement of squares on a page, he introduced CSS enhancements one step at a time, ending up with an attractive tea cup display. Gradients, round corners, animations, and eventually a way to theme the tea cup based on the user's language setting!

We also saw a demo of the HTML5-heavy Planata service, from Alexey Shelestenko and Gregory Grigorenko of Moscow. Planata is a time tracking service that takes advantage of WebSockets for real-time updates, storage APIs to store desktop configuration between sessions, drag-and-drop, and many features of CSS3 to enhance the user interface.

Chrome Web Store

The Russian GTUG recently ran a contest to developer installable web apps for the Chrome Web Store. We were fortunate to witness a demo from the winner, Gleb Arestov. His Seesu app lets you search for artists to find news and music from them. Gleb explained the technologies he used and the influence of User Experience (UX) concepts on his design.

We also had a demo from another contestant, Bookmark Stream. Anton Shaleyev, demonstrating on behalf of Dmitry Degtyarev, showed how the app allows users to mark content for reading using the new Chrome Extension context menu capability - users can right click on a link and save it for reading later in the popup menu. When they visit the app later on, they will see all the content they have bookmarked for later reading.

Chrome Extensions

In the extensions session, Yuri Byanov showed us the Goozzy extension. Goozzy is a "sticky note" service allowing users to annotate any website, and share the annotations with others. It takes advantage of Chrome extension content scripts to inject logic and content into web pages the user visits.

Next, we had a presentation from winners of the recent Chrome Hackathon at the Kyiv GTUG, who had travelled from Ukraine for Google Developer Day. Andrew Yasinetskiy and Izzet Mustafayev demonstrated MapEmAll, an extension to convert address listings into maps. The core logic was built and demonstrated in just a few hours at the Kyiv event, and the team has enhanced it since then. The slides are a good insight into the kind of coding used to construct Chrome extensions.