News from January 2009
Memories and articles from back in the day
A case for optimism?
It’s clear from developments over the last few months, and even the last couple of days, that the current economic climate is one few of us, even those old enough to experienced the dot com bust of a few years ago have any great experience of.
There’s certainly plenty of cause … Read more »
The state of Web education
The venerable “A List Apart” today publishes two articles on the state of education for web professionals, the first by Leslie Jensen-Inman, whose recently finished a Master’s thesis, where she
interviewed thirty-two web design and development leaders. Each of them expressed interest in the formal education of the next … Read more »
Going to SXSW? Make sure you get yourself connected
John and I went to SXSW 3 years in a row between 2005 and 2007. The first year was pretty good, suffused as it was with that thrill of meeting people we’d known via email etc for years. But the second year was probably the best for a whole host … Read more »
Campaign Monitor — giving back
Here at Web Directions we love Campaign Monitor. And what’s not to love? These guys have the best email marketing software for designers in the game, a slick new look and feel for all their sites and … Read more »
And now we play the waiting game
Interesting article over at Web Worker Daily talking about the impact of the recession, at least from the US point of view.
Got me thinking about how we might get a handle on what is happening here. … Read more »
Web Directions North discount period ends Friday
Just a quick reminder that the discount period for Web Directions North 2009 ends this Friday, the 17th. Sign up before then for just $895 (including all taxes for):
- 24 practical, inspiring sessions by world leading experts
- fully catered breaks and lunches
- opening night reception and legendary closing night Media Temple … Read more »
Scroll Number 1 — full articles now online
How quickly a quarter of a year rolls by. When we launched Scroll during Web Directions South 08 we promised that all the articles would be published in full online 3 months after the print magazine was published, so, here they are.
If you didn’t manage to get your hands on … Read more »
Ten user experience myths debunked
Whitney Hess has gathered together insights from a whole bunch of influential user experience practitioners and writers to debunk a few myths about what the profession of user experience actually is. She came up with The 10 Most Common Misconceptions About … Read more »
Palm Pre and webOS
Palm has just announced their very interesting looking webOS, and Mojo web application framework. Unlike Apple, Palm are essentially making the way you develop for their devices the way you develop for the web.
According to Palm, Mojo is:
a new application framework based on the HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript standards … Read more »
Bokeh Type Toy
Another little distraction from the Man in Blue — the bokeh type experiment. Real real pretty.
Oh, and in case you didn’t know already, bokeh is that effect you get in a photograph when you have a narrow depth of field, and some bright points of light and … Read more »
Ignite Sydney, January 22 — Register now
The second Sydney Ignite will be held at the Shelbourne Hotel on January 22. If you haven’t registered to attend already, get in now — it’s free! There are still a few places left, but these will go quickly.
The idea of Ignite is simple — presenters stick to … Read more »
John’s HTML5 article in A List Apart
There’s an article by me (John) in today’s A List Apart, on the direction that HTML5 is taking in regards to semantics. I have long thought the approach HTML5 takes to extended the semantics of HTML was problematic in several ways, being not backwards compatible with at the very … Read more »
The State of the Web survey results
We’ve just published the report from our first (hopefully) annual “State of the Web” survey.
Some surprising results from the survey include
- Nearly half the respondents use Mac OS X Leopard, and over half use a non Windows Operating system. Windows XP still outweighs Windows Vista among these users by … Read more »
Google deprecating support for IE6?
TGDaily has an unattributed report asserting that
Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service “twice as fast.” Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it … Read more »
Google’s “Browser Security Handbook” published
Michal Zalewski at Google has published a “Browser Security Handbook” the goal of which is
to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a … Read more »
- Nearly half the respondents use Mac OS X Leopard, and over half use a non Windows Operating system. Windows XP still outweighs Windows Vista among these users by … Read more »