Here are some random notes from the Paris Hacker Meetup #4, hosted in Joshfire’s great hall, a couple of weeks ago.

The first talk was from Tristan Nitot, about the relevance of Mozilla in the web today. Mozilla’s point of view is pretty straightforward: the web needs a major non-profit actor to balance Apple/Google/Microsoft’s leadership. Fair enough. Although I left Firefox for Google Chrome about two years ago, I 100% agree with this and keep an eye on Firefox’s new releases.

Nitot also introduced and demoed Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko project. I’m afraid Mozilla is kind of late to give the mobile road a ride. If Nitot mentioned a great interest from manufacturers and operators about this project (the project’s homepage specifically mentioning “Customization for OEMs & Operators”), he didn’t mention what would be the interest/difference from potential end users. As a matter of fact, I see OEMs & operators as the evil actors in the mobile world (all these shitty app layers that most non-hackers users can’t get rid off) more than Apple or Google can be.

Next was Michel Bartz for a talk about his high-traffic web experience. The talk was both super interesting and entertaining: thumbs up. I had heard the name of most of the mentioned tools but have never used them. So although I can’t give valuable comments of these products, here’s the list in case it might help somebody and for personal bookmarking:

Last but not least, Sacha Greif introduced his really interesting Step by Step UI Design eBook, an eBook explaining how to design a UI, step by step… Just realizing the title of the eBook is really good.

Random list of things mentioned during the event :