Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Mark Pesce – You-biquity

Virtual reality isn’t the television of the future, it is the telephone of the future Background We’re in a time and place where anything is possible; much like at the birth of the World Wide Web We are at least 98% identical to chimpanzees. We have now found the gene that gives us a bigger […]

Derek Featherstone – Designing for Accessibility

Screen magnifiers make graphic text blurry, but alt attributes still render as proper text If we’re not writing scripts to suppress the right click menu, perhaps we should avoid suppressing the showing of alt text on images in IE Square brackets are often used to separate links to different document formats; when read through a […]

Jeremy Keith – Progressive Enhancement with Hijax

Public health warning – there will be code! Taking notes on a code-heavy presentation is a difficult challenge; I strongly recommend you grab Jeremy’s presentation slides to accompany these notes. AJAX is often treated as all or nothing technology, much like plugins – either you have it, or you don’t. Ideally you want to have […]

Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams – Web APIs and Mashups, work you don’t have to do

MP3 of presentation (to come) Transcript (to come) Presentation slides Session description LiveBlog post About Cameron Adams and Kevin Yank Presentation slides Session description Adding JavaScript to your portfolio used to mean more work. Thanks to the wide range of APIs springing up from the likes of Google (Mail, Maps, Ads, Calendar, Search, etc.), Yahoo! […]

Cheryl Lead and Ben Buchanan – Moving your Organization to Web Standards

Cheryl’s experience with Virgin Money I’m going to save the world by making my company go to web standards – Cheryl Lead Used numbers to sell the idea X more applicants if we make it accessible 400,000 legally blind web users in the UK. Tesco launched Tesco Access and made 13 million pounds more via […]

Andy Clarke – Inspired design

I’m not going to talk about CSS today, I’m hardly going to mention standards Art is design without compromise – Jeffrey Veen Limitations of what we do: Environmental – inflexibility of 2D screen; Materials – limitations of CSS et all; Medium – poor support in older browsers; Ourselves – unlearning what we have learned from […]

Molly Holzschlag – The New Professionalism

Vast chasm between what consumers understand the web to be and what is required of us to build the web. Mum doesn’t need to know XML, XHTML et all to get online, post photos, have a blog. This is fantastic and needs to remain. The chasm has gotten worse since the early days of the […]

Derek Featherstone – Accessibility 2.0, Where do we go from here?

where are we right now Checklist syndrome – Section 508, WCAG, IBM Web Accessibility. These lead to a mindset of compliance over anything else. Accessibility is not just a technical endeavour or a quality assurance process. In reality accessibility is about removing barriers; it is personal. Derek demonstrates a ‘typical’ search bar – mentions that […]

Microformats – John Allsopp

How can technology make people’s lives better? John has a 10 month old daughter; he doesn’t get out much. He wants to see a movie, but what good movies are out right now? Centralized solutions – Someone owns this data, we have to trust them not to be biased. Search – 38,000,000 results for the […]

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson – What We Learnt Building Campaign Monitor

Background started IT firm ‘Switch IT’ during the first web bubble 2003-2004 approached by more customers to send bulk email Always something missing from existing applications – the seed of idea is planted Took a few hours per day for 6 months to have a go at building their dream email campaign system Designed exclusively […]

Jeremy Keith – Exploring AJAX

“what is Ajax? That is what I’m going to try and answer today” Introduces AJAX and the birth of the term. Maybe it is just a buzzword; maybe that’s not a bad thing X in AJAX adds “the X factor” – if anyone’s looking to coin the next buzzword, stick with X. Clearly we need […]

Keynote: Kelly Goto – Designing for Lifestyle

Everyone’s talking about the internet, what’s working, not working for them. Different cultural implications of technology – very different whilst very ‘the same’ “two years ahead, ten steps ahead” – what will we have to work with in 2 years from now? Designing for lifestyle is where we really are – dive deeply into immersive […]

Notes from the Front Line

The following posts will be in raw note form for now so as to allow me to keep up with the presentations while getting as much online as possible. When I get some more this evening I will come back and expand upon the points. Caution: falling character debris… [tags] wdo6, raw notes[/tags]

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Three days of talks, two of them in the engineering room. Web Directions you have broken my brain.

Cheryl Gledhill Product Manager, BlueChilli