soledad penadés

EdgeConf

I am going to be in the Web Components panel at EdgeConf London tomorrow (21th of March).

Being the perfectionist nit-picky person I am, and having never been in a panel of this type, I'm obsessed with getting ready and reading as much as I can on the subject. Still have a bunch of proposed questions to go through, but I hope I'll do good. Wish me luck!

The conference is supposedly going to be streamed live and talks recorded and professionally subtitled, which is awesome because speech recognition and my command of English don't seem to mix.

Audio Tags

Also, I forgot to post about my latest Mozilla Hacks article: Audio Tags: Web Components + Web Audio = ♥. It is a write up on my CascadiaJS 2013 talk with the same name, only with better looking audio tags, less jetlag, and a lot of editing--thank Angelina for that!

Web MIDI

Good things that came out of the article: somehow some people got to learn about my interest in Web Audio, then I showed my existing experiments and cried begged for Web MIDI in Firefox so I didn't have to use node.js as intermediate actor. Then Kyle Machulis (also known as qDot) decided to take the Web MIDI API in Firefox bug. Which means that sometime soon we'll have support for Web MIDI in Firefox. Which means that a little bit later we could have Web MIDI in Firefox OS and Firefox for Android. Which means... well, do you really need me to explain how cool that can be?

Imagine controlling synthesisers with your really portable device, or using MIDI input devices to control things in your phone... all in JavaScript? There is a huge range of portable audio devices specifically targeted at iPads: there is a market for portable audio creation. Why not making it easier?

But we need help. Kyle is also working on Gaia, and he can't implement all himself. I'm glad the ever helpful Chris Wilson (one of my personal developer heros) is always keen to give advice (example), but we need more than that. Building Web MIDI support implies building a Hardware Access Layer (HAL for friends) between the browser 'core' and the MIDI interfaces for each operating system. We're talking of at least three different HALs--Linux, Mac OS, Windows. And this is where you can step in and become another Firefox hero! If interested, ping me or Kyle or probably just ask in the bug.