Pete LePage

Thoughts on web development, life, and photography.

HTML5 Slide Decks & Presentation Timer

A couple of folks at GDD and other events have asked what I use to create my slide decks, and I figured I’d share and add a link to a little plug in that I wrote for the slide decks. My slide decks are based on HTML5Slides, the Google HTML5 Slide Template - it’s the same one that was used at Google IO, generally by the Chrome DevRel team and lots of other folks.  It’s freely available for anyone to use, modify, fork, whatever you want, and creating the content for it is pretty easy.  One of my favorite...

Google Developer Days - South America

My leg of the Google Developer Day tour is almost over, and it’s been AWESOME!  Wow!  Not only have I now visited 6 out of 7 continents (anyone know of any conferences or events in Antartica - it’s the only one left I’ve not been to), but I was able to add Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires to the list of cities that I need to come back and visit while on vacation.  I’ve been thoroughly impressed with all of the developers here who showed me some of the really cool stuff that they’re working on. I presented two...

HTML5 Hack-A-Thon Coming To A City Near You

Well, hopefully it’ll be near you - if not, let me know in the comments where you are so we can try to get some more of these events set up! Google is holding a few developer focused hack-a-thons around the US and would like to invite you to attend. At these events, we will be covering some of the latest and greatest features of HTML5, Chrome Web Store and In-App Payments. You will learn about the end to end flow of building a web app, distributing the app and monetizing it using these APIs. You will also...

Is It Time To Rethink Web Navigation?

While on my way into work this morning, I read a post on SixRevisions asking the question “Is It Time To Rethink Website Navigation?” For a very long time, navigation on websites has been stagnant, it’s either a navbar across the top, or maybe down the side. Sometimes, with a little JavaScript, it’s interactive, but it almost always contains the same types of link. The logo almost always takes you “home”, there’s an about link, a site index link, contact us, well, you know what I’m talking about. Oh, and...

What Makes For A Great Web App?

What makes a web application great?  I recently sat down with Christos, one of the guys on my team to look at a number of the top web applications in the Chrome Web Store to try to identify which ones were really great, versus good, and what advice we could give to the good apps to become “great”. Before we could start rating these apps, we built out a set of principles and criteria that we felt were important in providing a great application experience on the web.  We based our principles on some earlier...

The Anatomy of a Great Chrome Web Store Listing

Your first chance to make a great impression with a new user is often on your application listing page in the Chrome Web Store. People will make a split second decision whether to install your application based on what you put on there, so it’s important to make a great first impression. Let’s take a look at what makes a great Chrome Web Store application listing. This guide highlights a couple key components of a great Chrome Web Store listing. I tried not to repeat content from the documentation, but...