Web Directions South 2008
This year I attended Web Directions South in Sydney. It is the premier conference in Australia for Web Developers and Designers to attend, learn, be inspired and network with other professionals around the country and world who attend this conference. It is a 2 day conference with an extra 2 days of work shops if you are interested. But as I am too busy at work at the moment, I could only afford the 2 days away from the desk.
Thursday @ WDS08
The Day started off with an opening Keynote from Lynne d Johnson; “New media – new business”
Lynne will set the tone of the conference this year with insights into the future of media drawn from her wealth of experience in business, media and online communities as Senior Editor at Fast Company.
Lynne D Johnson @ WDS08
This was one of the most interesting and thought provoking keynotes I’ve listened too that I can remember. Lynne addressed the direction of media, and discussed how mediums like print are on the way out at a fast pace, and being replaced by the web. One remark I heard which I loved was along the lines of, “I was looking at a forklift loading up a truck of 50,000 newspapers, and thought to myself, that is the most expensive 50,000 pages hits to a web site I’ve ever seen”. Will print media die? No. It will always have a place, but as Lynne said, it will most likely become a more niche market, and as I always propose, that the minimal print objects are merely a means for people to visit a website.
iPhone Development Session
Later on in the day I listened to Tim Lucas and Pete Ottery and developing for the iPhone. This was a really interesting and cool session from a CSS/XHTML point of view, and they showed just a handful of cool CSS features you can deploy with the iPhone version of Safari (Some CSS3) – and they also demonstrated some usability woes the steer clear of when developing for the iPhone, which I have taken some notes on. Tim and Pete have developed a number of iPhone sites, including the iphone.news.com.au website, and the mobile version for the WebJam website.
Javascript Session @ WDS08
After lunch it was time for the much anticipated Javascript Libraries super session for 3.5 hours with Craig Sharkie, Cameron Adams, Ben Askins, Jason Crane and Earle Castledine. This session the discussion was panel based, discussing the pro’s, con’s of jQuery, YUI, Scriptaculous and Javascript from hand. It was a really really interesting discussion, and for me who doesn’t do an awful lot of Javascript programming, but interested in learning more, it was really good to see the pro’s and con’s from a number of developers and have given me a head start on learning some more Javascript.
August and his Keynote
The last session for Thursday was by August de los Reyes who is a legend in so many eyes. August went into an area of IT and Application development that really interests me; and what’s behind complex application interface design. He went into many historic notable designers and lots of research that helps us as designers understand where we have come from, so we can more efficiently go into the future. August works at Microsoft on the Surface technologies. Some other things that interested me was the discussion on weather emotions are merely a label for our subconscious of events we have witnessed. Do we have the Event > The Emotion > Then the response OR is it the Event (Seeing a snake in your kitchen) then a Response (Tightening up and a pulse etc) then the emotion of fear etc, to label that event. It sounds really complex for a website designer to need to know about, but with application development it’s good to know these things so we can better improve the experience of the user.
Using the Microsoft Surface PC - no mouse or keyboard required.
Once again, we looked back in history to see where have come from, so we can easiler see where we are going and how we can get there. One of the main themes were the TUI – GUI – NUI. Which stands for the Text user interface, like original computers, Graphic user interface, which is what we have now on normal Computers, and the next step which is NUI – Natural user interface, which is being used in the new Microsoft Surface PC, that I was fortunate enough to use!
Friday @ WDS08
Friday morning we started with Jeff Veen – and the session called “Designing our way through data”. This session was really interesting, and for a third time we looked back into history to see how some of the most influential people have tackled data design and how we can learn from that. Jeff was one of the leaders at the Google analytics program which is a system for website owners to parse the data of traffic on their website and see it’s statistics. There was tonnes to learn here again, and it was really interesting to see scientists / designers in the 1800′s who developed ways of visualising data in a way that it is easy to understand. A notable quote that came out of this talk, was that any form of design is a form of a story, and that everything that is over telling the story should be taken out, and that you can be then be guilty of “Decorating the Design”.
Veen also talked about some interesting points which carried on from August’s talk, on “Consume Media” like newspapers, TV etc and “Participate Media” – starting off with things like Pong, and computers. Another interesting point was that why print designers find it so hard to design for web. The Web you loose control of the media, and that is something hard for most print designers to accept. Rather than designing a 10×10 advertisement and using fixed CMYK colour codes, the web you have no control how wide, how high, what the screen renders the colour as – and it can be very challenging for designers to overcome and truly understand.
Later during the day I listened to the “Choosing the right framework” session – however I found this one to be a bit low energy, and not exactly what I was interested in, as it covered Ruby on Rails and Python, and Joomla, all of which I’m not really interested in. Joomla was interesting, and I learned that it is actually Australian based.
The rest of the day, I listened to Myles Eftos talking about OpenID and OAuth, which was interested, but as discussed at the end of the session, it does really have it’s flaws about it.
Overall it was a tremendous conference and I will definitely be wanting to attend next year.
