Last night (or I should say early this morning) I got a chance to watch some of the webcasts from the Firefox Developer Conference in Tokyo. I had been wanting to attend one of the previous developer days but had to pull out due to accomodation problems so it was really great that webcasts were available, I believe this is the first developer day to do so.

I managed to catch most of the sessions on FUEL and XULRunner and some of the presentations on the development environments that extension authors use. The first two were good to watch, simple overviews of topics that can often get too bogged down in details. I won’t say I learned a great deal new from them, but then given my background I wouldn’t expect to. I really hope they make the recordings available so when the next person comes onto IRC asking what XULRunner is we can point them to it.

The presentations on development environments were somewhat more challenging to watch remotely, the webcast didn’t really have the resolution to bring out the detail of what the authors were doing and there was some time lagging on the video so what was being described didn’t correlate with what you could vaguely see on screen. Plus it was nearly 9am here so I had to call it a day at that point and get some sleep.

All in all what I saw of the event looked excellent. Top work by the translators, I don’t know if they were volunteers or hired in but they did a great job of handling all the technical terms that were flying about. I hope to make a dev day soon but till then lets keep up this theme of webcasting them so those who can’t be there still get a chance to be involved. One thought from the future, how about taking questions from the remote viewers over IRC?