Last weekend, I sat down to learn a bit more about angular, a TypeScript-based programming environment for rich client webapps. According to their website, "TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript", which makes the programming environment slightly more easy to work with. Additionally, since TypeScript compiles to whatever subset of JavaScript that you want to target, it compiles to something that should work on almost every browser (that is, if it doesn't, in most cases the fix is to just tweak the compatibility settings a bit).

Since I think learning about a new environment is best done by actually writing a project that uses it, and since I think it was something we could really use, I wrote a video player for the DebConf video team. It makes use of the metadata archive that Stefano Rivera has been working on the last few years (or so). It's not quite ready yet (notably, I need to add routing so you can deep-link to a particular video), but I think it's gotten to a state where it is useful for more general consumption.

We'll see where this gets us...