Hi Max,
It's too bad that no one has yet been able to answer your question about day one of the conference. Perhaps people who were at the conference were too busy to answer. I'll make a stab at the opening keynotes and continue on a bit for others who might have not been able to attend. I was able to make it this year and was quite pleased with it. As one of the people who helped with the organizing of it, though, I'm not sure I can be objective, but I was very impressed with the talks, the venue and the facilities, logistics, and ambience support provided by Microsoft. They made it all seem easy. I'm not a blogger or a tweeter, so don't know what people may have written in those sorts of places, and with the dual track format, each person was only able to see approximately half of the presentations. I was very pleased with the keynote addresses (that everyone got to see). 1. Microsoft hosted the conference and Patrick Dengler (senior program manager for Microsoft who also represents MSFT on the SVG Working Group) gave the opening keynote. I saw it as a gentle recap of why SVG is good for companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Adobe, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Canon, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc. (though I'm not sure Patrick mentioned all of these, and one also thinks of CERN, LANL, ECMWF, Boeing, and the like where SVG is mission critical and already being used ). He then demoed some of the new features in IE10, including the new and welcome support for filters. Filters, are for those who have worked in the area, one of the places where speed is most critical and with IE's hardware acceleration, I'm anxious to try it out! He also echoed a point he has made before: (at least this is how I heard it) that providing access from HTML to many of SVG's wondrous capabilities benefits that environment as well. 2. Igor Kopylov (Google) talked about Google docs, where SVG is used across the environment and not just in the drawing parts. I found it quite fascinating, particularly the use cases for SVG for font support and for addressing all the crazy browser inconsistencies currently in support for text and fonts. From the abstract: "Successfully incorporating SVG into an application used by millions of people has pushed the limits of what's currently possible with the technology." I thought the talk illustrated exactly that and did so quite convincingly. 3. Mike Bostock (Square) talked about D3. It was undoubtedly the most discussed presentation of the conference. D3 is the intellectual descendent of Protovis that Mike developed at Stanford with his advisor Jeff Heer. D3 is utterly amazing! People involved in scientific, economic, medical, business, and artistic imaging owe it to themselves to learn a bit about it. His presentation was stunning. 4. Paulo Veiga and Pablo Luna, the creators of WIseMapping talked about their open-source project for collaborative brainstorming. It allows the creation of "mind maps" in which conceptual relations between ideas can be drawn easily, hierarchically nested, edited and relocated. Concurrent collaboration, as perhaps enabled by websockets is one of their current initiatives. As a well-crafted SVG-intensive open source project with (I think they said) tens of thousands of users worldwide, it is worth watching. 5. The conference closed with an "SVG Wow" presentation from Erik Dahlstrom (Opera) and Vincent Hardy (Adobe). As always, their animated and interactive visualizations were superb. These two are among the most gifted of 21st century artists working in the medium of Internet. They both, at the same time, harvested numerous examples of wonderful things "found" on the internet that others have done. Both addressed the increasing maturity of web graphics and the proliferation of SVG into other technologies like HTML, CSS, WebGL, JSON, D3, JQuery, sound and media formats and the rich cross-fertilizations that emerge as it does. I thought it quite informative that they both used D3 in some of their new work. Some difficult choices about what to see had to be made and I was busy scurrying, so my big regrets were not being able to see some important things I wanted to (like Jon Ferraiolo's presentation http://www.svgopen.org/2011/presentations/66-How_Maqetta_httpmaqettaorg_uses _SVG/index.pdf ). That and the facts that Professor Yan Li couldn't be there to present her work on GIS and cartography (meaning I had to) and that my to-do list is now longer than it was before the conference. I have some new hare-brained schemes brewing that I hope to find time to share. Cheers David From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Max Dunn Sent: Monday, October 17, 2011 7:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [svg-developers] SVG Open, day one... Has anyone made it to SVG Open? I will be there the next two days but missed today. A summary of day one would be great. Great to see SVG finally gaining some real momentum. Thanks, Max [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [email protected] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! 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