After messing around with it for some of my latest presentations, I just updated the Mozilla HTML5 presentation template (on github). It has been a while since I did that, so here are some new features:

• Smooth transition from slide to slide
• Blockquotes with cite link
• Notes functionality
• Smooth inner-slide bullet navigation (greyed out to full)
• Option to suppress page numbers
• Centered, left- and right-aligned images
• Image frames, dropshadows and frame dangling animation
• Live code editing

You can see how to use the system in this 10 minute screencast.

Happy editing!

Helping out people with giving their first public presentations can be frustrating. The reason is the misconception that we have based on years of conditioning in school and corporate environments that a good presentation stands and falls with the slide deck.

Of course a beautiful slide deck is a nice thing to have and allows you to emphasize your points. In some instances it is also extremely important to have a good and consistent slide deck. But when you start out and want to become an engaging speaker sweating about what slide format what font and which system to use is a waste of your time.

You already have the killer presentation tool: yourself. Your talk will stand and fall with your performance, how engaging you are and how much you know about the subject matter that is interesting and relevant to the audience. And this is where you should start. You become engaging by being engaged yourself. The first step to any good presentation is to find out why you are excited about the subject. Then build on that.

Sharing your excitement is the most addictive and convincing thing there is. When you are confident that you can explain why you are excited and how the audience can get to the same stage, you could stand in front of a wall of drying paint and people would still remember your talk as something that helped them and was interesting.

Slides are an aid – something to bring your message home. Wallpaper, so to say. At least in talks that are meant to engage and audience and get them to find out more by themselves.

If your presentation is to a group in a meeting room getting everyone up to speed on the state of a certain project – different story. But even then reading from your slides is not the best way to keep people awake. Nothing says “this will be boring, feel free to skip parts” more than an agenda in your slide deck. Sometimes this might be needed, but that is already an indicator that the meeting is badly organised.

As to what format and system to use: find what makes you most effective. Writing your presentation should be about bringing the messages across, not playing with technology. Just be aware that presenting at an event in 99% of the cases means you will have no connection to the web and that making your slides available to the outside world is a different step to preparing and presenting your talk. There are a lot of “host your slides here” systems out there – these are great for distribution, less so for reliable presenting.

Google just announced that on 1st of July 2013 they will shut down Google Reader as a service. Just like that. The reasons are meager:

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

This is a big disappointment for me. I have a few thousand RSS subscriptions I get my information from (and send it out on Twitter and Google+ which a lot of people appreciate). I can not see how any other resource than feeds give you the speed, quality and control over the content you consume on the web.

Yes, RSS has been declared dead many times and people keep banging on about the social web and that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others have replaced the old style of blogging and having an own feed. But I don’t buy it, sorry. Every social network is full of senseless chatter and organised advertising. Social media experts and PR folk make sure that information about certain products and celebrities get read and retweeted. I don’t care about that. I don’t want it. The same way I don’t watch public access channels or randomly surf channels but instead plan what I want to see on TV. Random exploration and finding things by chance is fun, but it is not helping you to keep up to date – it is the ADHD of information consumption. I myself use Twitter, Facebook and Gogole+ much more frivolous than my blog. The reason is that they are terrible as an archive of my thoughts or to put out structured data. Search is terrible in Twitter, which is why I use pinboard to bookmark links I tweet automatically. Google+ has the same problem. Finding quality information is damn hard as all the social networks are there to have lots and lots of interaction and not make people write good articles or posts.

Of course the real issue is that this is not about users or the web or making it easy to find information – this is about numbers, quick updates and showing more ads to people. Google+ is where people should go in the Google world. There was never an offer to pay for Reader. I’d have loved to pay for it – much like I paid for pinboard.in when delicious got the “oh we innovate and make it prettier” treatment. There is also no way to pay or call the shots in Google+ – as the consumer you are just there to bear with changes and use them or not. What’s the difference between a circle and a group? How many competing ways to organise our contacts can we use before we spend more time shifting sources around rather than reading what comes from them? Can you rely that anything you put in will be available for you later on? Can it be indexed and searched outside? Maybe, but will that be the same in the future? RSS was open – it was decentralised and used the web to link to each other and give you a mechanism to get information about news without having to go to a site and surf it. This is not good for advertising – you need to own the interface to own the user’s attention. Twitter is also feeling this heavily which is why it is killing all third party clients one by one.

My favourite answers on Twitter when I said that I am sorry about Reader going to the farm where old services go was that people told me that there surely must be an app doing the same thing. Maybe, but how the hell is an app that I need to download and install on all my devices a replacement for a very simple web service with great searchability and archive-search and very quick keyboard controls? Any app needs a sharing button where I need to go to yet another service and the first app needs to log-in on my behalf. On Reader sharing was copy+paste. Simple, works, and it also means when App B gets hacked my personal social stream on the web is not full of spam.

It seems to me that we’ve been thoroughly brainwashed into seeing a nicely packaged – and hard to upgrade – app as the better option for anything. To me, it isn’t. Reader was a simple App tab in my Firefox, lighting up whenever there was something new. Easy to go to, press J a few times and go back to my other tabs where I create things, write or read. Of course this is not how everybody uses the web, but this is how content producers use it. I don’t write long descriptions of my links on my mobile – I re-send them, I simply distribute instead of filtering, commenting and distributing with context.

No, I don’t want to switch to an app for that. And neither should you. The power of the web is connected content – via links and open text-based formats that are easy to index and search. Content permeates through your environment – whatever it is. You shouldn’t have to have a certain app to consume it or comment on it or change it. More walled environments with a “live stream” and no access to the archive or linkabilty are not the answer to keeping the web a knowledge resource. They are the answer to the need of showing us more ads and making us click pointless “like” buttons. The interactions are what is monitored and counted. Not the content – content is just there for a fleeting moment until the next information fix scrolls into view.

I just finished a talk at another “developer conference” which is a side-attraction at a larger trade show and decided that this was the last one of those that I will do.

The reason is that I’ve done a few of them, and they’ve always been a disappointment to me. Of course there are great ones, I am sure, but I’ve had quite a lot of very disappointing experiences. In detail these were:

• Poor attendance by developers – it is a trade show, people are busy running around and dousing fires on demos not working instead. Trade shows are full of distractions and attractions and having a full day taken out is too much for a lot of people.
• The AV setup was always abysmal. I always had to bring my own connectors and got a minute or so to set up whilst the last speaker still answered questions. The sound was always bad as you are in some hall to the side with lots of blaring music and advertising and – in the worst cases – with two side-by-side stages where you hear other people talk and not yourself
• There is never a recording of the talks or a centralised repository where to get the slides and other materials afterwards. It seems organisers just expect lackluster talks by company speakers to lure people to their respective stands and writing a bespoke talk made me feel like a waste
• There was always an overall feeling of half-hearted organisation being sold as “being different for developers”

All in all these “amazing developer event inside the main event” appear to me as a petting zoo for developers. The market knows developers are important, but there is no point or much of value for them on a trade show. So, let’s have some own playground for them to do two hour hackathons with prizes and some talks that don’t really need planning. It feels condescending and to me out of place. Especially when the rest of the show is staffed by half-naked booth babes who have no stake in the product they are actually promoting (something that simply needs to stop). Developer events have a different goal than that.

If you want to integrate developers into trade shows (as it might be useful as they will be around anyways) have an own event in an own venue or a day before or after instead. The way I found things to be organised now just seems like a bleached carbon copy of a good idea. Instead of asking known speakers or asking for sponsoring from large companies and yet another “look our product $x makes it so easy for developers, you are almost redundant” talk, have unknown speakers get up there, allow local small companies to do a technical talk and show themselves (as they are not likely to be able to afford an amazing booth at the show). Have partner companies of large corporations show how they use the products sold as infallible and give information what the real experience looks like. Be disruptive, be different than the main event, but don’t force it by stating you are different without delivering.

Hackathons take time, workshops need dedicated and non-disrupted and prepared attendees, developer talks need audiences. Don’t cheapen this because it seems simple to organise and you already have a location – of sorts.

If this sounds arrogant then it is only because I have been disappointed about all this. I love events, I know how much work it is and I want every event to count for the audience, the organisers and the speakers. I’d rather have “conference in conference” organisers allow someone unknown to speak and give them coverage and promotion in the main event channels than get known speakers in. That’s helping more people on the whole.

I am happy to give a keynote at a partner booth, show demos and examples and talk to the press. But I will give someone else the chance to have a go at talking at these sorts of events in the future. Not because I feel too good for them, but because I feel that these events need to change drastically – or vanish.

I just got back from CeBIT in Germany which hosted the Mooseconf developer conference. My part of the show was to give a talk about Firefox OS and what it means to HTML5.

I gave that talk twice, once in the morning for a closed audience of developers and a repeat in the afternoon for the open part of the conference. The slides and notes are online and there is a screencast available on YouTube.

In the talk I reminisced about the time I had at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week showcasing Firefox OS to 57 different journalists. I especially remembered running into an interviewer who was very much a novice in the ways of the web. To make him understand I came up with a simile in my desperation explaining that “Firefox OS is the Volkswagen Beetle of smartphones”.

This was based on the original idea of the Beetle as a car that is affordable for everyone and to be a massive boost to the car-manufacturing industry.

The Volkswagen Beetle, officially called the Volkswagen Type 1 (or informally the Volkswagen Bug), is an economy car produced by the German auto maker Volkswagen (VW) from 1938 until 2003. With over 21 million manufactured[6] in an air-cooled, rear-engined, rear-wheel drive configuration, the Beetle is the longest-running and most-manufactured car of a single design platform, worldwide. Wikipedia

Firefox OS follows the same principles:

• Its aim is to replace feature phones in emerging markets with HTML5 based phones that match the functionality of non-affordable or even locally available smartphones
• The phones are based on the proven Firefox engine (Gecko), fully open and standard-proposed APIs and a Linux core (Gonk) that also powers Android
• Parts of the beetle were interchangeable between its versions. That ensured that spare parts are easy to come by. Firefox OS is powered by and runs HTML5 applications. You can easily turn a current mobile-optimised web site into an app and get much better hardware access support with a few lines of JavaScript and a manifest file
• The idea is to give HTML5 the hardware platform it deserves, not to be allowed to run on platforms that treat it as a thing that runs in browsers and is blocked from accessing the interesting parts of the device

In the rest of the talk I went through the different parts that make Firefox OS special. The ability to search for apps by content for example – enter the name of a band and you get Music, Video and Lyrics apps, enter “restaurant” and you get review apps. In essence we make app discovery and “try before you buy” as easy as surfing the web. This means we need you out there to spice up your “mobile friendly” pages and at least add local caching mechanisms.

I talked through the different levels of apps in Firefox OS and their rights to access the hardware and how to make even your hosted apps get access to the hardware by asking the user to do it with web activities. These are the same idea as web intents that Chrome had and now discontinued (for the moment).

I end with a listing of the resources to get you started and an explanation that the web as a platform is far from over. If you bet on HTML5, you build for now and all the other platforms (using for example phone gap) and the future. And with Firefox OS you reach a whole new market that now only could afford low-end Androids running the stock browser which is not the best HTML5 platform by a long shot.