I’ve been at Seneca College for the Mozilla Toronto Developer Day yesterday and today for some great unconference-y style talks and hacking.

Monday, otherwise known as “The Mark Finkle Speaking Marathon” (I believe he gave 4 talks!), started out with mfinkle opening up and introducing the Developer Day topics and schedule and then launching into an overview of the various Mozilla technologies. What was kind of cool is that this Developer Day is targeted towards people new to Mozilla development. After Mark’s overview, I did a brief demo/intro to Songbird, and then talked about how our experiences building on the Mozilla platform and community citing the strengths of XULRunner/XPCOM and why we <3 it. During my Q&A most of the questions were about Songbird itself, as opposed to our experiences with XULRunner, though we had some good discussion with one guy about the auto-update framework.

Jono followed up with his usual excellent Ubiquity talk/demo (which coincidentally I'd just seen a couple of weeks earlier at the Mozilla Labs meetup @ Twitter) which generated a bunch of excitement as should be expected

After lunch we broke off into two different tracks (Application/Desktop & Web); I missed Mossop's talk on building a XULRunner application to watch Mark cover some of the new and upcoming features in Firefox 3.1 (DOM, worker threads, getElementsByClassName, JSON, querySelector), many of which looked really cool and potentially really useful in Songbird. Vlad's follow up talk on Multimedia & Graphics was fantastic; it was the first time I'd really seen a lot of the technologies in person (such as SVG-in-CSS, CSS transforms, combining SVG filters with the <video> tag for cool in-browser video effects, etc.).

Today has been a pretty free-form day; we've split off into a couple of rooms, one focusing on Testing & Mozilla QA, and the other being sort of a XUL Workshop where we're just doing random hacking on XUL apps and extensions. It's mostly a chance for people to ask questions and get help in person which is fantastic for folks new to Mozilla development.

We'll be wrapping up in a few hours, but hats off to mfinkle for organizing this whole get together, and to David Humphrey of Seneca@York for hosting!

(I've uploaded my photos here!)