• New York Times Reader is a gorgeous reading experience – if our local online papers could produce a reader like this, I would pay for content. As it is, I read the free content provided in the New York Times reader and enjoy it a great deal.
• Plastic Logic’s eReader
• Just to keep the fire fueled: Apple iPad rumours still simmer away – between patents being filed and leaky reps, I am looking forward to seeing the first quarter of 2010 and the possible announcement of a new Apple product-line.

Beautiful colours of Darling Harbour, Sydney as the rain swept across the city throughout the day.

“Moo [.com] put me front and centre.” “Customer service is the new marketing.”

Deb talked about being a good host at a party is the mindset to making a great web experience. That greeting, talking, facilitating new relationships with users and participants was what would keep people connected with a site/brand/experience. She urged everyone to:

• think like a social animal
• observe
• join in community conversations and activities
• help users – new and experienced, both
• to stand for something
• put love in because we’ll get love out
• be consistently attentive – avoid grand gestures
• experiment
• listen

Suggested a site that makes everyone smarter – by their knowledge and connections was a great thing. Let users learn about you, them them learn about themselves, let them meet others.

Above all, she wants us all to respect our users’ time.

“[I move] in and out of clouds of connectivity.”

Rob feels that space is collapsing. He walked us through his thoughts around the idea of how we experience technology now, compared to 50 years ago. He quoted “it takes 20 years to become an overnight success”.

He talked about the fathers of information architecture, and about virtual reality. From the 60s and early examples of augmented reality to today’s dabblings with targets and Flash (for instance). How, by using programs on our mobile devices, we can view the world with a layer of information augmented over the top to enrich our informational experience.

He talked about the future – how it’s already moving towards having that enriched experience leave a hand held device and become part of us – first an example of eyewear, followed by the (cringing) image of circuitry on a human’s eyeball.

Use Google Analytics and Google’s Web Optimisation toolkits for measuring and testing questions of user preference, rather than taking guesses at what people prefer.

Presentation at Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 9 2.40pm.

“The internet is the colour of the future.”

Matt wove science fiction and tales of hiking the great steps of America into an inspiring, entertaining and thought-provoking Keynote. A wonderful mind-setting for the conference.

An amazing keynote to end Day One. Cameron paces his way with gentle humour and an attention-grabbing presence.

He talked about Google Wave, and how the team came to some of the decisions around the design of elements such as threaded (for want of a better word) discussions.

Wonderful presentation.

Video or Podcast from Web Directions South 09

“How pissed off would you be if you were the Terminator and you came back in time and forgot to Google Sarah Conner or check her Twitter feed?”

Scott Gledhill, Beyond SEO presentation

Tag-team presentation covering the usual suspects of search engine optimisation. Touching on feeding and education the rest of the business to realise it’s everyone’s focus to produce content, decisions and directions based on good content, to feed the search engine animals.

Presentation at Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 10.45am

Accessibility Chickens! Damien’s session was the stand-out for me. I enjoyed his style, and his content. Drilling deeper into the whys and hows of encouraging accessibility through the entire process of producing and publishing content for the web.

He reminded us that accessibility is not just for people who are blind or have low vision, there are other very sound reasons for creating sites that follow accessible guidelines. People who access our sites for whom English is a second language, for example; or those whose literacy is low; or people who use assistive technology to access and input with the site; and he reminded us not to forget the aging population who might find fine control of a mouse to hit, say, small button targets quite difficult. He also mentioned ’situational disability’ such as glare on a screen when using technology outside, etc. He urged us to value this market as they tend to be tenacious, determined, and very loyal to sites that meet their needs with less effort than other sites.

He put forth reasonings why accessibility didn’t have to be boring, nor did it have to be expensive. In fact, it could and should be part of good practice across all disciplines of web development.

Damien asked us to ‘embrace accessibility’ – to learn about our (whole) audience, to get the right people with the right skills to work with, to integrate accessibility into the entire project cycle, and to test and measure and seek feedback – throughout the project and ongoing during maintenance and beyond. To stage implementation – starting with the most important aspects and building out from there. Overall he asked as all to be innovative.

“Thanks to the internet and the right assisted technology – never has it been a better time to access information.” “Have cane – will travel.”

“This is the first presentation I’ve given where I’ve heard a happy captioning story.”

Scott retraced on some of Damien McComack’s session, and drilled down a little more in certain areas of new media.

He told us about barriers to access, beyond those already mentioned, such as broadband speeds and uptake, aspects of ‘cloud computing’ and general accessibility (as we refer to it) including the cost of assistive technologies and software.

The four tenants of accessibility:

1. Perceivable (adjustable content, can I read it?) – alt tags, captions, accessible content, contrast, can I see it? can I hear it?
2. Operable (being able to find what you want) – keyboard accessibility, time available to consume content/media, content doesn’t cause seizures, navigation is usable
3. Understandable (content) – is the text readable? understandable? predictable? help users to avoid and correct mistakes, stable over time
4. Robust (other technologies) – authoring tool accessibility (turn it on in your software, then listen to it’s advice)

Taking HTML5 a step further | Sylvia Pfeiffer

[content to come]

My Notes from Day One Sessions

Day One Keynote from Adobe, featuring Mike Chambers, Andrew Spaulding and …

• Packaging is the term used when we take existing content and wrap with additional technology into an installable file for a particular
  platform/operating system. Content is installed with the correct user experience for the platform. Launch content from existing user workflow. Hide raw content in file system. (don’t scare or confuse users – be as seamless and easy as possible)
• Major platforms:
  • Symbian S60 (mostly Nokia phones, some Samsung, Smartphones) packages require SIS (Symbian Install System) format, an SVG image for the icon, the SWF file is treated as passive content.
  • Windows Mobile (Smartphones) packages require CAB format and an ICO image for the icon
  • Nokia (Mid-range consumer phones) require the NFL (Nokia Flash Lite) format for packaging, a PNG image for the icon, a ZIPped file package, points to content rather than installing.
• Packaging tools:
  • SWF2NFL AIR Application
  • SWFPACK.com
  • on the horizon? Adobe Mobile Packager
• Distribution:
  • Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player currently supports 31 devices, Flash 8 and AS2.0 content, Video (On2 VP6, Sorenson, 3GPP, H.264), MP3 streaming, data services via XML and SSM (Simplified Security Model).
  • Nokia Ovi
• Funding Opportunities in the FlashLite world:
  • Flash Lite Developer Challenge
  • Nokia “Calling All Innovators”
  • Nokia / Adobe Open Screen Fund

WebDU Podcast [28.4 MB]

still not sure how this saves time – in fact, not entirely sure he even mentioned how it saved time. Phil’s main argument for PureMVC was the complete separation of “church and state” with an increased flexibility for reuse and scalability. Phil created an entire application for sorting WebDU speakers and sessions, with only the interface and data having been pulled together earlier.

Showcasing (?) the new API with examples of custom windows, tagging including customised, animated (spinner class) tagging, perspective shadows, occlusion of overlay items. He provided links to the Google Maps API Flash Group and Hosting Maps.

WebDU Podcast [25.4 MB]

My Notes from Day Two Sessions

Day Two Keynote from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft featuring Alan Noble, Wilf Wilkinson and Mike Kordahi

Alan Noble – Google
“It’s never been a better time to be a developer, so get out there and build stuff!”

I think the very best thing about working at Google (of all the things that must be great about working at Google) is the ability to say “we” …”We developed Google maps…” “We released Chrome… Android…” etc etc. Pretty sweet. Here’s a list of the 6 trends as seen by Alan Noble – and probably anyone who sat down and compiled a list. While the talk was interesting, there wasn’t anything “new” mentioned.

• search (only about 10% done)
• Social Applications (sharing, collaborative, complex business processes)
• Geospacial
• Mobile
• Digitalisation (separating data from medium)
• The Cloud (huge data centres)

Neil “Wilf” Wilkenson – Yahoo

A much more developer focused/ code based talk around YQL and Yahoo! developer tools, online tools etc encouraging mashups and lateral thinking. The guy reminded me of Tim Wayper. I can’t really talk much to this in detail as it was a bit over my head – but a lot of people in the audience were excited by it.. and also perplexed as to how little Yahoo seems to promote itself when it comes to how innovative they appear to be.

• Yahoo! Open Strategy
• Yahoo! Query Language (YQL)
• Design to grids
• Utilise font percentages for accessibility and scalability

Michael Kordahi – Microsoft
“How cool was that? I mean really? YQL: Select for the internet, dude!”
“Shit…I was told not to swear. Can we take a vote? Is ‘shit’ a swear word? No? good. Oh, Shit!”
“Any game developers [here]? [no game developers] Huh? I thought you guys were awesome and stuff!”
referring to Apple “…that fruit company..”

Who knew the most dynamic speaker at this morning’s keynote (actually the entire WebDU so far) would be from Microsoft. Kordahi is passionate (about life I think, not just Microsoft), articulate, animated and a charismatic speaker. Big change in the audience with this speaker was the laughter from women. They (we) liked him and responded by laughing at _all_ his funnies, no matter how small. I’m sure if I’d turned to the woman behind me I would have seen her eyes transfixed on Kordahi while absentmindedly tucking her hair behind her ear. He was totally scoring all over the room and I bet he didn’t even realise it.

News Flash: Virtual Earth is dating Photosynth.

Brian Chau has been a constant since the early Macromedia Software Launch events. The man is perpetually ageless. His accent is particularly endearing, exchanging p’s for b’s and r’s for l’s. I particularly like when he refers to the key board as the “key bort”. Today he set up a multi-user video and chat channel. It sounds easy when broken down into the five steps:

1. create an actionscript communication file (.asc)
2. create a netConnection
3. have the server talk to the client
4. let the client talk to the server
5. remote share the object

Download and install the media server. Create a folder for application. Save the .asc file to the root of app folder. create another folder inside app folder to store media. Utilise the FMS ADMIN CONSOLE to monitor server-side activity and help debug code. Piece of cake!

• netConnection >> netStream >> Data
• files: pacific.adobe.actobat.com/bchau_fms

WebDU Podcast [26.6 MB]

Pixel Bender is a fast filter renderer that can be deployed to After Effects, Flash and Photoshop. Download and install the Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit.

• .PSK file format for AE (export from PB and drop into AE Plugins folder)
• .PBJ file format for Fl (export filter for Flash)
• .PBK and PBG file format for Ps (export from PB and drop into PS Plugins folder)

Google these peeps: david lollar, Mrdoob, killer kernal/fractal bender. URLs: video-flash.de, derschmale.com, eiromdesign.com, aviary.com

WebDU Podcast [22.8 MB]

WebDU Podcast[28.4 MB]

WebDU Podcast [25.6 MB]