Web Directions Podcast

Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don't have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world's most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge. Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He created YSlow, the performance analysis plug-in for Firefox. He serves a

Most apps suck. Making an app that doesn’t suck is hard work and requires uncompromising focus. We call apps that don’t suck "usable". However, in the Age of User Experience, making apps that are merely usable is no longer good enough. So how can you go beyond making usable apps to creating exceptional experiences that evoke powerful emotions in users? In this inspirational session, Aral will offer you an impassioned glimpse into his approach of authoring apps that people find joyful and fun; apps that people fall in love with. Delight, story, empathy, character, voice, beauty, fun, and play are just some of the topics that will be covered and illustrated with examples from Aral’s decade-long experience in authoring web, Flash, desktop, and mobile apps, including his latest top-selling iPhone app, Feathers. Aral Balkan is an independent interaction designer and developer with over a decade of experience in creating web, Flash, desktop, and mobile applications. His latest iPhone app, Feathers, was featur

Continuing a popular @media tradition, the final session for day one, hosted by Jeremy Keith, will feature a handful of speakers discussing questions posed by conference attendees. Wear your flak jacket: there will be controversy! Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with the web consultancy firm Clearleft. He has written two books, DOM Scripting and Bulletproof Ajax, but what he really wants to do is direct. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he’s not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane. His loony bun is fine benny lava. Follow Jeremy on Twitter: @adactio Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Thought SVG was dead? Think again. Once relegated to plug-in status, Scalable Vector Graphics is now spreading rapidly, in browsers, mobiles, and even televisions, with broad native support and graphical script libraries. It’s used on major websites like Wikipedia, Google Docs, and the Washington Post. Whether images or apps, standalone or integrated into HTML, CSS, or Canvas, SVG is a powerful tool in a developer or designer toolkit. With full scripting support, animations, and advanced visual effects, SVG lets you reuse skills you already have. Learn how to use SVG to best effect to add standards-based bling to your webapp or site, see what works and what to avoid, and glimpse where the future lies. Doug Schepers works for the W3C as the Rich Web Clients Activity Lead, and the Team Contact for the SVG and WebApps Working Groups, and participates in several other groups, including HTML and OWEA. He is an editor of the Element Traversal, DOM3 Events, and SVG specifications, and co-chairs the SVG Interest G

This session will be a solid introduction to CSS3 by way of practical examples that can get you started using CSS3 on your projects today. Rachel Andrew will take you through some of the core features of CSS3 including advanced selectors, media queries and other features that are being developed and starting to be implemented in browsers. In addition to discovering how CSS3 will change the way that we develop in the future we will explore current and upcoming browser support. We will also see how it is possible to start using some of CSS3 in your projects now, with the help of a little JavaScript to plug the holes in current browsers. Rachel Andrew is a front and back-end web developer and Director of edgeofmyseat.com, a UK web development consultancy and the creators of the small content management system, Perch. She is the author of a number of web design and development books including CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks (3rd edition), published by SitePoint and also writes on her blog

Server-side JavaScript has really started to take off, with a number of great projects providing different pieces of the puzzle. This talk will introduce server-side JavaScript and provide an overview of the existing projects as well as some ideas about where it’s all going in the future. Tom will look at how the various JavaScript runtimes, such as V8 and Rhino, affect development and provide their own unique features. You’ll also see the standardisation effort of Common.js and why it’s shaping how people write server-side JavaScript. All the leading SSJS frameworks - Node.js, Narwhal, Jaxer - will be discussed as well as some more quirky uses of JavaScript on the server such as CouchDB and YQL. Tom Hughes-Croucher is an Evangelist and Senior Developer in Yahoo’s Open Strategy Group, focusing on Yahoo¹s Web Services and Cloud Platform. Tom joined Yahoo! to work on the Yahoo! frontpage in Europe as a Front end engineer. He brought his experience from contributing to a number of Web standards for the Wor

Grid systems have been used in print design, architecture and interior design for generations. Now, on the web, the same rules of grid system composition and usage no longer apply. Content is viewed in many ways; from RSS feeds to email. Content is viewed on many devices; from mobile phones to laptops. Users can manipulate the browser, they can remove content, resize the canvas, resize the typefaces. A designer is no longer in control of this presentation. So where do grid systems fit in to all that? Mark Boulton is a graphic designer from the UK. He’s worked in Sydney, London and Manchester as an Art Director for clients such as the BBC, T-Mobile, British Airways, and Toyota. Mark now runs his own design studio, Mark Boulton Design. A stickler for applied typographic and design theory, Mark is an active member of the International Society of Typographic Designers and writes a design journal at markboulton.co.uk. Follow Mark on Twitter: @markboulton Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike

This talk will be a comprehensive look at what you need to know to properly test your web applications on mobile devices. We’ll look at the different mobile phones that exist, what browsers they run, and what you can do to support them. Additionally we’ll examine some of the testing tools that can be used to make the whole process much easier. John Resig is a JavaScript Tool Developer for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. Currently, John is located in Boston, MA. He’s hard at work on his second book, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, due in bookstores in 2009. Follow John on Twitter: @jeresig Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Crowdsourcing applications take indigestible tasks and break them down into digestible pieces, enabling a group to help plough through large scale projects in much shorter periods of time. Designing and building crowdsourcing applications incorporates a fascinating range of challenges, from usability, psychology and interaction design to scaling applications for surges of traffic - all the while ensuring that contributors are rewarded, good behaviour is encouraged and the resulting data comes out in a useful format. This talk will discuss lessons learned building serious crowdsourcing applications on newsroom schedules at the Guardian, and playful crowdsourcing features for WildlifeNearYou.com. Simon Willison is a developer, speaker, writer and all-round web technology enthusiast. Simon works for Guardian News and Media as a software architect for guardian.co.uk and the Guardian Open Platform. Before joining the Guardian Simon worked as a consultant for clients that included the BBC, Automattic and GCap

Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how we can design to foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time. In game design, you create an arena for play. You establish boundaries and rules and you work to tune game dynamics that yield fun experiences rather than boring, mechanical, or pointless drudgery. Within those boundaries and rules the players create their own unique experience, collaboratively, every time. Again the marriage of strict purposeful constraints with open space and room for human variation creates the best game experiences. Can an enterprise app, maybe one that looks like a spreadsheet and reports to HR ever actually be fun? That’s a stretch but you can absolutely introduce elements of play into the most buttoned-down context. Consider one primitive gesture from games: collecting. Many games offer som

HTML5 was originally called Web Applications 1.0, but that doesn’t mean it’s only for scripters - there’s plenty for markup monkeys as well as JavaScript junkies. We’ll look at new structural elements in HTML5, and how they can boost accessibility, how to style them (even in IE!). We’ll check out how new semantics can reduce the JS you need to write/copy by adding functionality natively to the browser, and how to add sexy open standard video to your pages with no Flash, no JavaScript, just a big hunk o’ open-web love. Patrick Lauke works as Web Evangelist in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software ASA. In a previous life he worked as Web Editor for the University of Salford, where in 2003 he implemented one of the first thoroughly web standards based sites in the sector. Patrick has been engaged in the discourse on standards and accessibility since early 2001 - regularly speaking at conferences and contributing to a variety of web development and accessibility related mailing lists and initiatives

Inclusive Design is currently the domain of people who design physical things, like product designers and architects, but Sandi Wassmer is firm in her belief that Inclusive Design applied in the online environment just makes sense. The principles of Inclusive Design encompass so many of the practices, principles and guidelines that web designers are already using - Accessibility, Usability, User Centric Design, Progressive Enhancement and User Experience - but unlike each of these discrete practices, Inclusive Design gives designers the ability to offer choice, as a single design solution will never accommodate all users. Sandi will talk about how the principles of Inclusive Design can be easily adopted by web designers right now. By the end of the session you’ll have the framework for becoming an inclusion activist! Sandi Wassmer is a Human Rights Internet Marketer. Yes, it is a made up term, but that is the way she sees it. As Managing Director of digital agency, Copious, she is healthily obsessed with

HTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there’s a lot of focus on the new language, there’s plenty for web app developers with new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out as their own W3C specifications. This session will take you through demos and code and show off some of the outright crazy bleeding edge demos that are being produced today using the new JavaScript APIs. But it’s not all pie in the sky - plenty is useful today, some even in Internet Explorer! Specifically we’ll be looking at scripting the video media element, 2D canvas and some of the mashups we can achieve. How to take our web apps completely offline, going beyond the cookie and HTML5’s answer to threading: web workers. Remy Sharp is a developer, speaker, blogger, author of upcoming jQuery for Designers (Manning) and co-author of Introduction to HTML5 (New Riders). He also organises the Full Frontal JavaScript Conference and is one of the curators of HTML5 Doctor. jQuery team member (developer relations

More and more as front-end developers we are presented with new challenges, with the explosion of the mobile web it has created a whole new territory. How do we test the vast array of devices out there? And what tools can help us make this a painless experience? Testing web apps on mobile devices is a new challenge not yet fully explored. Let’s brush over the beginnings of web application testing and debugging and dive into current solutions for remote debugging. In this session we’ll cover what developers and browser vendors are doing to help tackle this problem, including some of the tools available to use today, and how some of these tools work internally and what the future may hold. Ryan Seddon is a Senior Front-end Developer from Melbourne Australia who has an unnatural obsession with JavaScript and the many places it runs. He also loves to tinker with any new web technology he can get his hands on and loves diving into specs and code to figure out more. In his spare time he’s either playing basket

Hannah Donovan will talk about the designer as a storyteller - especially in terms of the importance of this role within a team. Improve your output as a designer by taking a closer look at influencing the input. As a visual narrator we help to visualise, inspire and curate for the people we work with as well as connecting scenarios around the larger product saga that supports the interfaces we design. By examining your input, make your output more effective with your team and users alike, paving paths for people to tell their own stories as your product evolves over time. Originally from the icy north, Hannah Donovan is creative director at Last.fm, where she’s worked for the last four years. Before moving to London to work at Last.HQ, she designed websites with Canada’s largest youth-focused agency working on brands such as Hershey, Heineken and Bic. Previous to that, Hannah designed for Street Print, a Canada Research Council funded, open source web app for sharing and archiving printed ephemera. Hannah

Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge. Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He created YSlow, the performance analysis plug-in for Firefox. He serves a

Microcopy is the ninja of online content. Fast, furious and deadly, it has the power to make or break your online business, to kill or stay your foes. It’s a sentence, a confirmation, a few words. One word, even. It isn’t big or flashy. It doesn’t leave a calling card. If it does its job your customer may never notice it was there. In this session, Relly will show you how you can bolster sales and reflect your company and client’s values through just a few well-chosen words. Designers? Do you get lumped with the interaction copy? Developers? Do you get left trying to make meaningful error messages? Ecommerce managers? Do you want an easy increase in sales? This session will help. It will be a lot of fun. You should definitely come. Relly Annett-Baker lives in Brighton with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she thrives on the sea air and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being a freelance web copy and content writer, she is employed as live-in domestic staff by t

Over 4 million people in Australia have a disability. As a result they may use the web in a different way to you: a keyboard instead of a mouse; a screen reader instead of a screen. Accessibility is the way that you can tap into this large and growing audience. In this session, Damien will look at why accessibility matters - not just because it is the right thing to do, or a legal requirement. He will discuss how accessibility leads to more robust, maintainable, searchable and usable websites that meet everyone’s needs. Damien will also explore the opportunities accessibility offers for mobile web design, and provide some practical advice about how to include accessibility in your next project. Damien McCormack is an accessibility expert and manager of Vision Australia’s web accessibility services. Seven years experience working with people who are blind or have low vision has evolved into a passion and drive to make the world more accessible. In this time, Damien has worked with a large number of governm

So WCAG2 - version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as set out by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative - has been released as a Candidate Recommendation. What does that mean for Australia? There are many issues that were addressed in WCAG1 which have been left up to policy makers and developers in WCAG2. This session will highlight these issues and talk about what kind of impact they will have on your development and on your audience. From testability, to cognitive disabilities, we’ll go into the nitty gritty differences between WCAG1 and WCAG2 and what you will need to know to make sure that your site isn’t a potential target for litigation. In addition to development principles, we’ll address the current state of play in Australia; what the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) are doing and what each state has decided to do with WCAG2. Gian Wild is the Manager of Usability and Accessibility Services within the ITS Web Centre at Monash University. Gian has worked in the accessibility

With the proliferation and widespread adoption of JavaScript frameworks, smart developers have wondered if a similar approach to smoothing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frameworks like Blueprint, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boilerplate, and many others were born. In this session, we will survey the landscape of CSS frameworks and consider how each of them deals with the unique challenge of creating generalised, reusable CSS styles. There are a number of different approaches, and some are better than others. Choose the right framework and you’ll save yourself a lot of work. Choose the wrong one, and you’ll find your projects weighed down by restrictive assumptions and masses of code that you don’t understand. When it comes to CSS frameworks, making the right choice is everything. By the end of this session, you might just decide that the right framework for you is no framework at all. As SitePoint’s Technical Director, Kevin Yank keeps abreast of all that is new and exciting in web technolog