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WTF is “the cloud” anyways?

One can barely move in IT and web circles these days without hearing reference to “the cloud” (in downtown San Francisco late last year I saw billboard and bus ads all over talking about the clouds!). But just what the dickens is it? There’s a nicely title article at Google’s Enterprise blog (referencing a classic […]

Opera turns 15

A big congratulations to long time Web Directions supporters, browser developers Opera. 15 years old today. (if you youngsters want a taste of the web in early 1994, or we old timers want to relive the glory days of animated gifs and more (sadly no evidence of the blink tag)) visit their home page today. […]

Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting book from Rosenfeld Media – Published today

Web Directions speaker Donna Spencer has got to the end of that long journey and today had her book, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, published by Rosenfeld Media. Congratulations Donna! In this book, Donna describes how to plan and run a card sort, then analyse the results and apply the outcomes to your project. I […]

Web Directions South 2009 Roadshow – It’s a wrap

Thanks very much to all those who came along last week in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney and made our first Web Directions Roadshow such a success. It was great to see such a good crowd come along to see the six excellent workshops. All the presenters said how much they enjoyed giving the workshops and […]

Web Directions speaker Dmitry Baranovskiy hits the big time

Many in the Australian Web industry (and beyond), particularly Web Directions attendees will know of Dmitry Baranovskiy, and in particular his fantastic Raphaël JavaScript Graphics Library. Via the excellent Ajaxian site, it’s exciting to learn that Blackberry is using Raphaël for a new, highly interactive and slick new site. In addition, the Washington post also […]

Offline web apps and client side storage with HTML5

Many web folks are probably keeping one eye on HTML5, but it can be difficult, with a great many parallel developments. We are all likely aware of some of the new elements and semantics like , , and so on, but maybe less so of some more low level aspects of the project like client […]

Fonts on the Web

Regular readers will know the issue of embeddable/linkable fonts for the web is more than a passing interest here at Web Directions. Today, font designer Tal Leming talks about the issues from the perspective of folks who design typefaces, while Jeffrey Zeldman interviews Type designer David Berlow from a similar perspective. There’s little doubt the […]

Christian Heilmann at Yahoo! in Sydney

Christian Heilmann, JavaScript and web dev guru who we are bringing out for the roadshow next week in Melbourne and Sydney, is also speaking at Yahoo’s offices in Sydney next Wednesday. So if you are keen to hear him, simply RSVP.

On the road part II

For those of our readers in Japan, Web Directions Express, along with HTML5 and CSS3 workshops by me, John Allsopp, will be on in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, in mid May. The workshops and evening events are in English, translated into Japanese. Details can be found at our Web Directions East site.

On the Road again

This year’s Web Directions Roadshow, featuring fantastic full day workshops from local and international experts Andy Clarke (Web Design) Brian Fling (Mobile web design and development) Grant Young (Social Media Strategy) Indi Young (Information Architecture) Christian Heilmann (JavaScript and Ajax) Lisa Herrod (User Testing) in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. If you’ve not yet booked, we’ve […]

WaSP’s amazing new education project and curriculum

With far less fanfare than it merits, the Web Standards Project recently launched their truly amazing “Interact” web education project, and first stage of their detailed curriculum for educating web professionals. Frankly, it’s impossible to convey the amount and quality of work that the team has put into it. If you’ve the remotest interest in […]

Ask the browser makers – PEte LePage from the Internet Explorer team

In the first of what we hope will be a new, occasional series at Web Directions, we speak with PEte LePage Product Manager, Internet Explorer, Developer Division about their goals with IE8, compatibility mode, with IE7 emulation in IE8 is identical to IE7 and more about the browser. Thanks to PEte for his detailed responses. […]

The perfect is the enemy of the good

The perfect is the enemy of the good Nice quote from Mark Pesce, who has an op ed piece in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald about the world full of surprises which will open up with the government’s very hi-speed broadband network. Update: I liked this piece on the same topic in Crikey as well, […]

Ignite Web – a great Melburnian night

Thanks to everyone who came along to Ignite Web last night at The Apartment in Melbourne, with particular thanks to the presenters for putting so much work into entertaining us all, Steve and Glo and the guys from Molt:n for running it all so smoothly, and the waiter at that cafe in Block Place we […]

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this was a masterfully curated event … a brilliant day that educated, entertained, and rekindled some old connections

Ash Donaldson Service & Behaviour Design Director, Tobias
Portrait of Ash Donaldson