Some development topics to check out:

• Developers vs. Designers (PDF) has great history, even if you don’t think Java is the answer.
• Even Faster Web Sites (PPT) gives some great tips to improve the performance of your site.
• Hack this app (PDF) is technical, but a mandatory reading for PHP developers.
• How to be Normal is a tough thing for a geek to achieve. Luckily, Mike Hillyer was talking about databases.

You down with ODP?

Most of the presentations are downloadable in some sort of slide format (as opposed to a web page). As I glanced through, I was surprised to see more Powerpoint (PPT) than the open document presentation (ODP) format. Strange, for an OS conference.

My tally shows that 19 supplied the Microsoft format, while 12 were ODP. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that Microsoft sponsored the presentation files page. Of course, PPT and ODP were both blown out of the water by another open format, PDF. About 70% of the downloadable presentations used Adobe’s format.

See also:

• New York Times’ Derek Gottfrid and NPR’s Dan Jacobson Discuss APIs
• Microsoft Dons Sheep Suit, Joins Open Source Foundation
• Alpha Geeks of Open-Source Converge at OSCON

Click To Play

Here’s an interesting video from last week’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

It’s Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales talking about the future of the search engine. Wales’ newest project is Search Wikia, a project that aims to use open-source software and development methods to build a search product that improves upon the current offerings from players big and small.

Wikia recently purchased the Grub web crawling engine, which it plans to release under an open-source license. But Search Wikia is definitely a long-term project. In a recent post to the project’s mailing list, Wales urged patience during the engine’s development cycle.

"Hopefully we will have the first stab of something that sucks up by the end of the year," he said. "And then we will start to revise, reconsider, rethink, delete, add, edit, change, until we start making something better and better over time. Will it take 2 years? 5 years? I dunno. It will take however long it takes. But it will be fun."

I was just turned on to Ohloh.net, an awesome directory of active open-source software projects. It’s a community site more than it is a searchable directory, though it functions just as well if you’re looking for details about a particular free software project.

Every application in the directory has a landing page that offers a short description, a list of licenses used and a summary of the program’s vital info — what language it’s written in, advantages and possible licensing conflicts are listed. Check out Firefox‘s page. Also, here’s Adium.

You also get the standard user input of any Web 2.0 gathering space: tags, reviews, comments and a 1-to-5-star rating. A nice touch is the development map, which plots the physical location of each of the app’s developers on a Google Map. An even nicer touch: there’s a spot reserved for a tiny direct download link just above the map on every page.

There’s also a handy metrics tool to track development on the different elements within a project — compare the speed of your source code’s development with the development of the tools you’re using to build it.

Developers can set up a profile page where they list their skills and the projects they’re working on. Developers can also give each other "kudos" for work well done. Kudos to Ohloh!

The morning’s executive briefing sessions are underway here at OSCON. Tim O’Reilly just led a discussion on stage about Firefox add-ons — what they’ve achieved, how the open source model has shaped their development and what they contribute to the web.

Sitting on the panel were Mozilla‘s Mike Shaver, who oversees the Firefox extension developer community, as well as two of the ecosystem’s most successful developers in terms of sheer user numbers: AllPeers CTO Matthew Gertner and StumbleUpon‘s Garrett Camp.

One of Tim’s first questions was a biggie: Why does Firefox’s
performance suffer when I install extensions? Shaver handled that one,
explaining that the browser’s architecture lets developers interact
with any of the services within Firefox. Ultimately, it’s a trade off.
Developers get the infinite access which allows them to shape the user
experience of the browser, but that sometimes results in a performance
hit.

O’Reilly also asked what happened to Netscape creator Mark Andreesen’s original vision of the browser as a platform. Is that where we’ve arrived? The panelists agreed, saying that Firefox extensions are building upon that vision. Shaver gave his view of the browser’s position as a way to access "the best software platform we’ve ever developed as an industry — the web."

Another interesting note came from Camp. Illustrating to the passion of free software users, he said that when StumbleUpon changes features in its Internet Explorer toolbar, he hears near silence. When a change happens on the Firefox side, the company gets flooded with e-mail about every little detail.

The final question drew some laughs: Are we moving into a world where Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are just device drivers for Firefox? An interesting topic, but the clock had run out and none of the panelists really had time to answer that in full. I guess the question will remain rhetorical.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson via Flickr.

All things open-source are on the agenda at O’Reilly’s ninth annual Open-Source Convention, which runs July 24-27 in Portland, Oregon.

Over 2,500 attendees are expected at the 2007 edition of OSCON. As always, we’ll see the usual tutorials and break-out sessions for programmers, designers, security experts and the like, but there will also be a healthy amount of debate about where open-source is headed and what issues it’s currently facing both as a model and as a philosophy. Some would argue that open-source lives on in every bit of technology we touch — from our set-top boxes and our web browsers to online services like Wikipedia and Flickr. Others would argue that it’s under a bigger threat than ever from patent threats and money-minded opportunists.

The debates begin in earnest on Tuesday with the O’Reilly Radar executive briefing sessions. We’ll be there to bring you the session highlights, as well as all of the important announcements. Chances are, we’ll also see a few applications and hardware innovations that we’ll want to tell you about as well.