pixelkin

via Kottke, via Fox, slingshot around the sun to land here at pixelkin.com.

Concept video outlining computer/human interaction. Apart from being interesting, the actual video is quite lovely.

Day Two of Web Directions dawned to a low, grey sky. Darling Harbour is beautiful, and even more so (I think) for the subduing of colours and reflections in the wet cobbles around the waterfront.

I had great fun with my Quad Camera iPhone application – capturing some of the colour and energy of the two days of great talks and interesting people. The Sydney Convention Centre is a wonderful venue for an event such as Web Directions – they put on really good, sensible, tasty food – and provided the most important part of any conference: baristas for good coffee. Sometimes that queue was pretty long though! I have photos of the food on the Pixelkinickr Flickr feed (try to say *that* after a beer or two)

Speaking of which, the parties were great fun, and as is typical of this industry, everyone was friendly and open. The second day saw a fewer notes due to aforementioned parties – but it was still a wonderful day.

I was so excited to be able to attend my first Web Directions South conference in sunny Sydney, Australia.

This is shaping up to be my “Year of Web Conferences” – 12 months and four wonderful opportunities. WebDU was just fantastic – and now I’m in my new job I have a great deal of focus as to what to attend at upcoming events. My seat seemed firmly planted in the Business track of this year’s Web Directions – past years might have seen me in Design and Development – but that’s the nature of this industry, isn’t it? change and changing to suit the needs of the moment.

These are some of my notes from the sessions I attended – I’ll add links to podcasts and video where I can to help pad out the holes and give a lot more context.

I had the incredible opportunity to attend WebDU09. The event was just amazing and interesting. I gained so much from the Flash and Flex talks – and wish I’d had been able to attend other talks as well – but there’s only so much a middle-aged Flasher can manage.

Thank you to all the people who made it possible for me to attend – I appreciated it very much.

PS: Note taking and live-blogging is not easy – as you will see. Hopefully the links to podcasts and videos will help more than my snippets of text.

Predicting the Past: Emotional Design and a Vision for Microsoft Surface
August de los Reyes, User Experience Director for Microsoft Surface
September 23, 2008 – 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Presentation Style: Based on The Lessig Method, with gorgeous graphics, video asides, repetition, gentle humour.

An amiable, quiet and well spoken August began sharing his team’s design philosophies which [...]