As you all know, its that exciting time of year. Conference Time. I have been looking forward to this event because it shows me the leading people in the areas of web standards, accessibility, XHTML, JavaScript and CSS. The organizers of the conference, John Allsop and Maxine Sherrin, always do an awesome job developing a conference which is exactly what us web developers/designers need.
Day 1 the quality of the speakers did not disappoint me at all. There were 4 content streams (design, dev, big picture and w3c).
For me today’s highlights were…
The intro animation by Cameron Adams, pure gold for a few hours work (supposedly after talking to him at lunch time), for those that missed it, have a geezer at this. Note: Use Safari 3+
Scott Thomas – @simplescott was the lead web designer on the very successful Obama campaign. Great advice on designing to inspire, convey trust and credibility. I so wish I had bough the book, but alas, not quick enough and he didn’t bring many with him.
Dan Rubin – @danrubin showed us how we can embrace HTML5 and CSS3 right now and maintain backwards compatability (even with IE6). Btw there have been some great shout outs for IE9 during the conference which is great to see.
Steve Souder – @souder. Simply put, Steve is a web ninja. He has two web optimisation books under his belt, worked for Yahoo, currently at Google, lectures at Stanford and oh, did I mention he developed yslow? As you probably guessed, Steve lives and breathes web performance.
Josh Williams – @jw was one of those talks where you just sat there thinking why didn’t I do that? Geo-location ninja and creator of Gowalla, it even has some Aussie in it? It’s a derivative of Go Wallaby which he got from the Australia film. (Not sure if he was joking about this or not). I liked the Hugh Jackman breaks too.
There were lots of other great presenters and don’t have time to mention them all. However, the guys at @campaignmonitor had an augmented reality remote controlled helicopter it was so cool. It amazing how accurate it is. Will post photos soon.
Dinner was at the Noodle Night Market, I had noodle soup and coconut juice, all for under $15, bargain. Met some top people and formed some good networks.
Campbell Craig 