In no particular order:
- Making Apps that Don't Suck: UX Basics for GeoNerds (video)
- Using the ArcGIS Flex API to Build Collaborative Mobile Applications Deployed on Multiple Platforms (Android and iOS) By Mansour Raad
- HTML5: Not Just for Breakfast Anymore! (video) By Brian Noyle, Dave Bouwman, Mike Juniper
- You Are Legend (with jQuery and the ArcGIS API for JavaScript) (video) By Glenn Goodrich
- Creating (and sharing with you) a Vector Tile Cache for ArcGIS Server (video) By Dave Bouwman and Mike Juniper
I only caught the last half of this because I didn't know Kirk was doing this one and there was another good talk going on. User experience is everyone's job, and some GIS developers are behind their web developer cousins/alter-egos in understanding this.
There is a sick combination here. First, it is being done by Mansour Raad, who is easily the most entertaining ESRI presenter I found during the conference. Second, any portion of the title has some interesting stuff for just about everyone - building cross platform mobile apps (the Android and iOS bit), collaborative mobile applications, and apparently there are some people that really like Flex. After this presentation you can count me among them. Much of the content of this talk is from one of his blog posts, but you're cheating yourself if you don't give this a watch.
Great stuff here on the state of HTML5 - in and out of the geo world - and some cool demos showing off applications working well on mobile/tablet/laptop devices with relatively little additional work (in these demos, a custom view engine for ASP MVC and Modernizr).
An important thing to keep in mind about every presentation you see is that the given specific technology typically being demonstrated isn't that important the long term - the field just evolves too rapidly. More important is the general techniques, thought processes, and tricks/hacks you can pick up from the presenter(s). Glenn's presentation is full of this stuff, even if the legend bit is more or less now done by later versions of ArcServer.
Grassroots open source development can drive a lot of innovation on a platform (gems for Ruby, easy_install/pip apps for Python, etc), but it doesn't seem to be as common in closed-source commercial software - software improvements instead tend to come top-down. It is thus encouraging to see the DTS folks setting their sights on vector tile caching, which is kinda a big deal for those of us that want to do client side vector manipulation/analysis with big data sets (like say an entire electric system).
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