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Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 14th.
Presentation slides
Session description
Let’s admit it, the tools for writing CSS aren’t very advanced. For the most part, the people who write tools don’t know about CSS and the people who know about CSS don’t write tools. Quite a conundrum! In this session, you’ll learn about good tools that can make development faster and maintenance easier. We’ll also talk a bit about where we can go from here. What tools do we need as sites are becoming more and more complex? We need to get beyond tools whose primary goal is to avoid hand-coding and realize that, as our techniques for writing CSS become more powerful, our tools can too! Session will include:
- Validators
- Preprocessors
- Finding dead rules
- Linting
- CSS3 gradient tools
- Performance measurement tools
- Unit testing
About Nicole Sullivan

Nicole is an evangelist, front-end performance consultant, CSS Ninja, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with Facebook and the W3C, and is the co-creator of
Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud. She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites.She co-authored Even Faster Websites and blogs at
stubbornella.org.Follow Nicole on Twitter:
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In this session, you’ll learn about good tools that can make CSS development faster and maintenance easier.
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Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 13th.
Presentation slides
Session description
Computers are increasingly being held in the hand rather than sitting atop lap or desk. We now have to consider how our products will work underneath a finger instead of a mouse cursor. Increasingly, too, those products are being delivered as native applications, capable of fully exploiting device capabilities. That has ramifications not only for the way those projects get built, but also how we structure the businesses that support them.In this session, Michael Honey and Tim Riley answer the question “web or native?” from business, product design and development perspectives. They cover the current state of web technology on modern devices and compare it to what’s available through native development platforms. They’ll look at web, native and hybrid strategies successfully employed by Australian and international businesses, and share their own stories as mobile and web developers. Finally, they’ll offer practical guidance on picking a strategy for web or native development that best suits your needs — as either a developer or a client.Tim and Michael are two of the partners behind
Icelab, an Australian design and development studio. They’ve trod both the web and native paths through their client work, such as interactive touchscreens for museum exhibits, online photo galleries and mobile tour guides, and also their own projects, like
Decaf Sucks, a coffee review community available on the web (optimised for both desktops and smartphones) and as a native iPhone app.
About Michael Honey

Michael founded Icelab after a career as creative director and later, interactive director in an agency environment. He has fifteen years’ experience in design for screen, print, video and exhibition spaces, and has expertise in writing, programming, direction and post-production. He is an experienced coder, with a particular interest in algorithmic animation and datavisualisation. He is also experienced in the development of diagrammatic animations for cultural, engineering, scientific and architectural clients.Michael’s interests include architecture, urbanism, and the environment.Follow Michael on Twitter:
@michaelhoneyAbout Tim Riley

Tim is a partner at Australian design and development studio Icelab, where he builds excellent web and mobile applications using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Cocoa, and occasionally out of popsicle sticks. On alternate days he runs Decaf Sucks, an online community for coffee reviews, and RentMonkey, which contains the greatest
Presentations about production
Podcasts, slides, videos and more
In this session, you’ll learn about good tools that can make CSS development faster and maintenance easier.
See the slides and hear the podcast »

In this session, Michael Honey and Tim Riley answer the question “web or native?” from business, product design and development perspectives. See the slides and hear the podcast »
This method enables practitioners to apply skills specific to their role to a narrow range of accessibility guidelines particular to their area of expertise.
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This talk will tell the story of Lanyrd, from a two-week proof of concept to a full-fledged startup via three intensive months of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. They’ll share the trials, tribulations and lessons they learned along the way. This is the talk they wish they’d heard before they got started!
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Change is never a smooth process. How do know when disruption is useful and how do you cope with the feedback on it?
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How do we test the vast array of devices out there? And what tools can help us make this a painless experience?
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After a lost decade in the wilderness, JavaScript is starting to change and evolve. We’ll look at CoffeeScript, a little language that compiles into JavaScript, providing concise ways to to write many common JavaScript patterns.
See the slides and hear the podcast »
In this talk, JavaScript developer and jQuery Core Bug Triage & Docs team member Addy Osmani discusses tools that can simplify your development process significantly.
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Developers have long been able to use an array of debugging, profiling and other testing tools to ensure application quality and performance. More recently, web developers have started to rely on increasingly sophisticated tools to help test their web sites and applications. But particularly in the mobile space, when developing sophisticated applications with web technologies, testing presents significant challenges.
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Esther will share strategies for evolving UI design as the software grows, keeping UI designers in the loop and helping everyone on the team be a better designer (cause they think already are).
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In this workshop-style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, technology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and participant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increasingly popular non-scripted research services.
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Web standards might be second nature to all of us here, but they don’t always fly so easily in the enterprise. Obscure browsers and CIOs watching their bottom line can often leave a passionate development team feeling stifled. In this session we’ll look at how a number of large scale websites successfully adopted new standards and opened their content to more audiences and devices than ever before.
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By now we all know that the web is not a publication — that it’s a living, evolving thing. But a lot of content I see still appears to be ‘published’ once and then left alone. This talk is about what happens after content is published.
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Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 9.10am.
The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures.
The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web — breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero — for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design — playful and rational all at once — to help us figure out what to do when we get there.
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Cloud services change the way a business or campaign can operate, increasing flexibility, taking less time to deploy and introducing superb cost efficiencies so that we can redirect finances to where they’ll really pay for us — in innovation, experimentation and planning ahead. With these opportunities, however, come challenges around data and platform security, change management and who “owns” the platform and data you are using.
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« Further reading