For those of you that couldn’t make it this time, here are a few photos of what you missed.

Ryan Carson, kicking off FOWA London 2011

Giorgio Sardo, talking about HTML5 Games

Browsers Panel (Left to right: Giorgio Sardo, Patrick Lauke, Alex Russell, Christian Heilmann)

Keynote at Tech.Ed China 2011

Coming next: W3Conf on November 15-16. If you register quickly, you can watch it in person – follow the live streaming or download the recorded videos.

See you there!

When you navigate to bing.com/maps, you will notice a new “viewfinder” icon in the top-left corner of the map. As you click it, the map will zoom automatically to your current location.

How does it work? The site implements the HTML5 Geolocation, which allow an User Agent, given the permission from the user, to query user’s location and receive her longitude and latitude coordinates.

The code that Bing used to implement this feature is really simple:

if (navigator.geolocation) {

    navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(

        function (position) {

            //TODO Center the map around 

position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitude

        },

        function (error) {

            //TODO Handle errors            

        });

}

else { 

    //TODO Fallback to IP resolution

}

The control available on bing.com/maps is freely available to any web developers; you can find all the APIs and the documentation in the Ajax SDK for Bing Maps. Preview live here.

Today the Bing Maps geo-location service works already in Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 10+, Safari 5.0+ and Opera 10.6+. It works great even on my Windows Phone 7 (with the Mango update)!

Note that if your browser doesn’t support HTML5 Geolocation, Bing Maps will fallback to IP location resolution.

(*) Unfortunately this is not the case for Google Maps. Although Google deserve credit for being the first to introduce this feature, they still don’t provide the geolocation support to any Internet Explorer user (including IE9). In fact the Google Maps page uses the “IE7 Compatibility” mode, which forces IE8, IE9, and IE10 to render the page using the old IE7 engine, instead of the default standard compliant engine. In other words, even if you have IE9 or IE10 installed on your machine, you can’t benefit of HTML5 features when you are visiting Google Maps. Hopefully this is something Google is working on and we will see a fix soon.

Enjoy.

Giorgio Sardo | Sr. Technical Evangelist | HTML5 & Windows Evangelism

X Icon Editor

Link: https://www.xiconeditor.com

Endless Mural

Link: https://www.endlessmural.com

Music Can Be Fun

Link: https://musiccanbefun.edankwan.com

The Shodo

Link: https://www.theshodo.com

Jitter Bugs

Link: https://html5.cynergysystems.com

Agent8 Ball

Link: https://agent8ball.com

Foursquare

Link: https://www.foursquareplayground.com

BMW

Link: https://joydefinesthefuture.com

Tron

Link: https://disneydigitalbooks.go.com/tron/

SVG Girl

Link: https://jsdo.it/event/svggirl

Lost World Fairs

Link: https://lostworldsfairs.com

Gridddle

Link: https://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/Griddle/Default.html

The Killers

Link: https://www.thekillersmusic.com

Pirates Love Daisies

Link: https://www.pirateslovedaisies.com

Pacman

Link: https://www.worldsbiggestpacman.com

Want more? Check out www.beautyoftheweb.com

Thanks to the amazing teamwork of Disney and Vectorform, it took just about 1 month to build the new Disney TRON: Legacy Digital Book Site, an immersive HTML5 experience built on top of Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Accelerated HTML5. In this post I’d like to share some of the “behind the scenes” stories from the team involved in the project,

Full article at: https://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/06/03/behind-the-scenes-of-disney-tron-legacy-digital-book-site.aspx

This blog post walks through some of the best practices for using the <audio> tag in your Web applications, and includes useful tips from real-world sites.

Full article at: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/05/13/unlocking-the-power-of-html5-lt-audio-gt.aspx

There are many news, from new HTML5 features to enhanced performance, from state-of-the-art security to redesigned user experience. Here’s my TOP 5:

1 – W3C Geo-location Standard

A page is now able to request the user location in a secure way using a few lines of code. The geo-location specification is now implemented by all major browsers! There’s no more reason for Google Maps to use browser detection code and block that feature to IE users…

if (navigator.geolocation != undefined)

    navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(onPositionFound, onPositionError);

function onPositionFound(pos) {

    Debug("Lat: " + pos.coords.latitude + ", Long: " + pos.coords.longitude);

}

2 – Clean User Experience

IE9 has by far the cleanest UI of all browsers out there today. Huge step forward from IE8!

(left to right: IE8, Opera, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE9)

3 – Performance

It’s fast. It’s smoking fast! You can measure it with synthetic benchmarks, you can run the demos on ietestdrive…but my advice is to run it with your favorite site. There’s no better benchmark than that!

(running The City of Videos demo on IE9 RC and Firefox 4.0beta11. Press ‘f’ to see FPS)

4 – F12 Developer Tools JavaScript Formatting

I absolute love the ability to format the JavaScript code using the F12 Developer Tools (embedded in the browser, you don’t need to install addons).

5 – Canvas globalCompositeOperation

As noted earlier, we have not been able to implement the remaining part of the <canvas> specification (globalCompositeOperation) in IE9 Beta due to still happening important conversation in W3C at that time. Since then we made a good progress and we are now happy to announce full support for the <canvas> spec in IE9 RC!

(Scratch-off demo by Beej Jorgensen)

Obviously there is much more…What are your TOP 5 features?

The latest version (v0.15) include fixes to these bugs and now fully supports IE9 Standards Mode. Thanks David!

Download here: https://typeface.neocracy.org/download.html

When we started the planning of IE9, we decided to offer more visibility to developers over the progress of the platform – releasing a Platform Preview every eight week. Thanks to your help, we collected thousands of feedbacks and lastly to make IE a better product. It’s been a great journey so far – the partnership IE Team-community has been working really well!

I just ran across an article from Mike Dewey. Forgetting for a moment about the “sensational title” (which btw is funny), I believe there are also a lot of interesting observations and feedbacks. I also like the approach of suggesting (for the time being) workarounds. Thanks Mike!

1 - “my application that appeared to be possessed by some insane daemon“

Lol. Do you have a repro test? Should we call the ghost-busters?

Seriously, let me explain what (probably) happened.

IE9 by default uses the IE9 Standards Engine, which supports all the great new HTML5 stuff. Thus, if you create a plain page with the correct doc-type and you publish it on your server, it will just work.

For compatibility reason, it also allow you to specify an older engine (IE8, IE7, IE Quirks) by using the X-UA-Compatible meta tag. Note that some website specify this rule “at a server level” by setting an HTTP header on all the pages. Bottom line: even in this case, you are in control of what engine you want to use.

2- globalCompositeOperation

As you noted, globalCompositeOperation is not supported in Platform Preview 7. Or, better, we support only the source-over state. We do care about supporting this property, but we also care about it being interoperable across all browsers.

At the time we announced and shipped support for the Canvas, the other browsers were supporting the globalCompositeOperation, but they didn’t have the same rendering behaviors – making developer life very complex. Chrome and Safari in fact implemented the drawing model differently from Opera and Firefox. You can still see this in action today. For instance, navigate to this site. Firefox 4.0b8 and Chrome Canary 10.0.638 are rendering different results. [We obviously looked at all other browsers, even if I don’t mention them in this post].

Given that evident interoperability challenge, we decided it was critical to have first that conversations with the HTML Working Group – before shipping something unreliable for end-users.

Since then, we believe we made good progress – you should expect to hear more from us soon.

3 – Canvas Resizing

Good catch! It looks like you are hitting an old bug that has already been fixed (fix to come in the next build). If you see similar issues in the future, I’d strongly suggest to file a bug to Connect. More on “why Connect” at the bottom of this post.

4 – Limited Shadow Offset

I admit this is weird, but I can’t repro on my machine. It’s possible that this falls in the same bucket of (3).

What I noticed instead is that different browsers render your code in a different way. I created this dummy page using the code on your site (let me know if I missed something) and here’s what I get.

Personally I believe Firefox is closest to the result I was expecting. What do you think?

Microsoft Connect

As you know, we highly appreciate developer feedbacks and we encourage you to try (and try to break if you want) the Platform Previews of IE9.

Remember you can download the latest build from www.ietestdrive.com and you can file a bug on Microsoft Connect. This will ensure that:

1. The IE team get direct visibility (and can eventually follow up if more info are needed)
2. Other users can rate the bug (which helps a lot!)
3. Users have visibility over the progress of open/closed bugs

Again, thanks Mike for your feedbacks. Looking forward to the next build!