My Presentation

For the first time in conferences, I started my presentation on time. Although it was the last presentation of the day, everybody was still there, that I didn't expect. For the first couple of slides that were all text, I thought that I'm being too technical with people still having no idea of what these things are, but after that examples helped and didn't felt like that to anymore.

It turned out that the screen-shots helped a lot and were quite well-chosen. The experience of this talk and the on from IUC 25 show that technical meetings have no place in conferences. In a conference, you have an audience who is not much familiar with your problems, and you just want to show them your stuff using examples and shots. For a technical discussion, first, you need at least two experts, and two very interested people. Here I was the only expert (at bidi stuff), and Owen was the interested one. So we just did our discussions in the pub later, instead of around a table in the conference...

I even got five or more questions at the end. Someone suggested that SVG with run-time strings may be a solution for translating icons with text in them. Good idea! We can add mirroring in there too. Someone noted that Keshide should be used to justified Arabic lines that I agreed. Owen was wondering if we can do user testing for the layouts. Someone else was asking if right-to-left layouts are really what a user expects or not, which I said yes, we've had them in DOS too.

That's basically it for the day. On the next day, several people approached me and expressed their feelings on how good my presentation was! Seems like the examples were chosen really good and I expressed the problem quite good. I didn't expect that at all. One of them was from Red Hat, thanked me for letting him finally know why Pango is there! The Eclipse developer also was interested in doing bidi stuff in their widget set (SWT). Someone from University of Waterloo asked me for the slides.

Well, finally I did a good presentation in English with no delay and other problems... I'm happy about that. I sat down and cleaned the slides and uploaded them. Again, here are the slides. Best work with Mozilla. They validate, but I'm not sure how they look with IE or another browser.

Two more photos of me presenting are here and here.

¶ 12:28 AM