Really Cool Site Containing Java Conference Videos

Yesterday I stumbled upon Parleys.com. It appears that Parleys has been around for a while, providing podcasts of various tech presentations (audio only). However, the new version of the site, still in Beta, takes their offerings to an entirely new level. It now contains several videos of presentations from various Java conferences over the past few years. Not only is the content fantastic, but the user interface is very slick as well. The UI displays not only the audio in sync with the slides, but also a video of the presenter, giving you the full experience. The navigation options are also great, providing a table of contents and a time line for the presentation…letting your jump to a specific point in the talk. In addition, Parley’s provides information about the speaker and the talk, a list of related talks, and the ability to post tags and comments at specific points in the talk.

In my opinion, the best feature provided by Parleys.com is the ability to watch the presentations, with all of the UI features, offline. This is HUGE for me, as I spend almost two hours every day sitting on a train. Parley’s provides an Adobe AIR application that makes all of this possible. Adobe AIR is a runtime environment that “lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems”. The Linux version of AIR, still in Beta, works wonderfully. The AIR application operates just like the site, and provides some additional functionality to download the presentations for later viewing.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately looking for a site like this. With the current economic conditions, I’d imagine that most companies are cutting back on the number of conferences they send their developers to. According to the site, they plan on continuing to add content. If they do, I see this as an invaluable resource for keeping up to date on what is going on in the Java community.