Web Directions North, Vancouver, January 28 - February 2, 2008

Monday

After a pretty gruelling 15 hours or so of airports and flying (remind me not to go forward a time zone to Amsterdam before then going back 9 hours to Vancouver again...) I got the hotel, checked in, and then met David in the bar for a beer. It was great to catch up, and we also spent some time having drinks with Cindy Li, Matt Harris, and Jared Spool. We then went in search of David's favourite thing to eat (large piles of barbequed cow), before returning to the bar and catching up with John Allsopp, Matt Webb, Craig Cook, Klaus from Yahoo, Tiff Fehr, and some more dudes and dudettes. Lovely to see you all again, and thanks for not making me drink too much on the first night - it certainly helped me survive the rest of the conference rather nicely!

In fact, it felt like a pretty tame conference, in terms of debauchery...

Tuesday

All day Tuesday was taken up with Jared Spool's usability workshop (Designing really usable web sites), which was pretty damn good, even though I had seen some of it before at other talks. Jared is a true professional, and really knows how to deliver a talk. At various points in the day, I had a good talk to some guys from the BBC, chatted to Andy Clarke for a while (good to see him after all this time!), and got some editing done!

Tuesday evening was also pretty nice and relaxed - David and I saw Maxine and had a chat with her, and then went for dinner at a nice chilled little dive bar. We also got to watch some ice hockey. Woop.

Wednesday

Wednesday was the first day of talks. After getting through a huge quantity of e-mail and phoning my bank to tell them to let me use my credit card to pay for the hotel, I had some breakfast with David and then went to see some sessions.

Return of the king of web standards - Jeffrey Zeldman

Zeldman's talk was mostly an interesting look at the history of the WaSP in the time he was there. He is a good speaker, and obviously has a lot of knowledge and respect in the community, although I couldn't help but feel that the whole manner of the talk was a little bit arrogant. He also mentioned the MS version targeting thang briefly, and how he agrees with it. Woop.

After Zeldman had finished, I had the pleasure of chatting with Scott Fegette from Adobe, and Craig Saila. I also ran into Jon Snook, which was cool!

Real world accessibility for real world people - Derek Featherstone

Next I attended Derek's talk on accessibility in the real world - it was nothign short of awesome; Derek is always very good, coming across as confident, competent, and delivering a talk absolutely rammed full of practical advice on making Ajax more accessible, and other such things. I will have to check out Dragon, which is a voice recognition program to help you navigate web pages with your voice. I've heard him mention it a few times.

After Derek's talk was over, I had a good long chat with my friend Suzanna whom I met at the last WDN, and Daniel Burka from Digg. Suzanne voiced her concerns with the MS versioning system. It is not very popular, shall we say.

I also met Jon Lane for the first time, after having him write stuff for me for quite a long time.

Lunch

Lunch was very tasty, and also very useful - this year they were running round table talks for those who were interested. I sat in on Matt Harris's "Web Standards in Education" talk, along with David and a few other guys. I told them all about my beginner's web standards course, and open the web, and dev.opera.com, and they were pretty interested. Matt then talked us through some of his feelings from the point of view of an educator in the UK. Lack of worthwhile course material is a big deal, which is why my course is promising. Some points we discussed are as follows:

Do we need to create material to get much younger children started as well? Matt said that the UK governemt wants to every child of 6 and over to have an ePortfolio of some kind by 2012. Obviously we can't expect 6 year olds to learn HTML and CSS, so how do we do this? From my point of view, I think it would be worthwhile to not bother with the underlying technology, but start to teach the children some generic transferable skills, such as good document structure, and using things like emphasis in documents (eg italic and bold), and learning design via emotions, eg happy, scary, sad. It is also a good idea to try to explain the Web to slightly older children starting with things they already understand on the Web, like MySpace and instant messenger. We need to instill good habits in them before they get anywhere near college. Being safe on the Internet is also very important for children, but Matt said the government haven't really considered this much yet.

Matt also suggested that books are ok, but we perhaps need more practical stuff, and that a mentor/apprentice type scheme might work. Another issue is working out what departments in schools will have the responsibility to teach all this stuff - it seemes like a combined effort is needed, for example when teaching children how to create presentations, maths is needed to teach graphs etc, art to teach presentation, English to teach the language skills. It would be useful to create some kind of diagram showing where all the different disciplines fit in.

I could also look in to talking to some of the people I know in the Flash scene who create eLearning tools, such as Kristin Henry and Eric Bort. Flash could be an easy way to create things like drag and drop environments to simulate web pages - allow childern to play around with dragging the differen elements of a web page around, place them in the right place, etc. There are a couple of companies that will probably be called upon to create solutions to teach this stuff to schools, but they will likely to be pricey and ineffective. We could really help with this.

Developing with Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight.

I decided to attend the AIR and Silverlight talk, just to see what they are up to, and how grumpy it would make me. It was pretty interesting. I actually think AIR is quite cool, providing File I/O functionality, and letting you create desktop applications using web standards. I've not got that much against it, as it is not trying to replace web standards; it just lets you use them in different ways.

Silverlight on the other hand...is pretty galling to hear about, and to be honest, I still can't really see web developers running in droves to use it. I asked a few developer types what they thought about it, and none of them seemed excited about it. I guess the main group of people that willl use it are .NET developers who want to use their existing skillset to create web applications. Anyhow, vitriol and bile aside, here is what I got out of the talk:

Silverlight is basically streamlined, optimized WPF for the Web. The Silverlight player is a 4mb plugin, available as a browser plugin for IE, FF, Safari, and soon Opera. It uses XAML for markup, and JavaScript APIs for logic (future versions will also allow development of logic using other languages, such as C sharp, Ruby, Python, etc.) It doesn't seem like there is much you can do with it that you can't do using regular web standards or Flash. Most of the examples he demonstrated seemed like good graphics, but terrible usabilty.

Ths map example amused me the most - he showed a Silverlight virtual earth application, and his justification for Silverlight being great to do this was that "using regular DHTML, the one thing you can't do is fade the tiles and labels." Oh wow ;-|

In the next break I talked to Matt Webb to make sure my intro for his presentation was suitable. He showed me his slides - they seemed really mad and abstract and over my head, but very cool!

Better Gmail - how google opened GMail's web interface to any developer who cares, and why you should - Gina Trapani

Ok, so the fact that you can add all kind of productivity improvements to GMail now using Greasemonkey is mildly interesting to a small-ish subset of developers (ie, those who use Gmail and Firefox), but I found this pretty dull and of limited use...I guess this is bacause I am not a JavaScript developer and I don't use Firefox!

The Adobe food/drinks reception

The evening Adobe event was cool - aside from running around hitting up Adobe employees for free drinks tokens, I talked to lots of people about their feelings on the MS versioning system - noone seems to like it, although some say they can understand why it is necessary from a business perspective.

Dinner

After the drinks had been drunk dry, David and I went out for a rather nice dinner with Suzanne, Craig Salia, Craig's wife (yup, I'm awful with names! well, she was going around wearing Craig's name tag at one point, which made it more difficult ;-), and Craig ex-colleagues for the Globe and Mail (ok, ok, shoot me - I really am terrible with names! The meal was lovely, although the walk there was rather wet...

Thursday

the third morning of a conference, and by this point I still didn't feel tired and hung over - something is obviously wrong here ... oh well, as my father always says, you gotta go with the flow.

Innovation is overrated - Indi Young

The first talk of Thursday was by Indi Young, one of the founders of Adaptive Path - having seen some other Adaptive Path-ers (and ex-Adaptive Path-ers) talk before, such as Peter Morville and Jeff Veen, I knew this mean two things were likely:

1. She would be scarily intelligent
2. The talk would go somewhat over my head

Ok, so the former was true, but the latter was only half true - she delivered a really fascinating talk on mental/interaction maps, the likes of which they use at AP to help clients figure out the kinds of things their users want to do with their sites, and how they want to do them, with the aim of improving the user experience. I need to read up more on these, as they sound fascinating. Indi has just released a book about them too, which I may pick up at some point.

In the first break David and I talked to some MS guys about nothing in particular - they all seemed very nice and chilled out. John Allsopp commented that it was like seeing a UN peace talk unfold ;-)

The Future of web interfaces - Cameron Adams

Next I saw Cam Adams's presentation, on future of web interfaces. It was cool, as he showed some Canvas and SVG examples, and also said that Opera was the only browser to really support media queries. It's nice to see that our intimidation tactics earlier on in the week have worked (bless him, he's never been much of an Opera fan!). One thing we do need to clear up with him however is Opera's SVG support - he said that most browsers have pretty buggy implementation, but Opera is cool for SVG.

Lunch

At lunch I talked to Derek, Dave, Jeff, and some other ace Canadian dudes over lunch about education, rock and roll, and Opera, then I talked to Kimerley Elam, a really nice lady from a university in Florida, about helping to test my beginning web standards course, and find me some authors for DevO. She had given a talk the day before on Typography.

Where's your web at? Designing for the web beyond the desktop - John Allsopp and Dave Shea

I next witnessed Dave and John's talk, all about the web moving outside the desktop and on to mobile devices, games consoles etc. It was very useful to see such a talk, as it was very similar in subject to the talk I'm giving at the Highland Fling! They covered a nice of mix of user experience considerations, and technologies such as media queries, and there were lots of nice mentions of Opera - cheers guys!

The why and how: UI case studies - Daniel Burka

The penultimate talk I attended was by Daniel from Digg - he presented a case study on how the design process for Digg and other sites of his such as Pownce was done, including initial assumptions and work, what was good and bad, taking user feedback on board, how the sites evolved, etc. Pretty interesting stuff.

Just before going off to get ready for my introduction speech, I had a good talk to Brian Fling along with David, about a lot of mobile stuff.

Movement - Matt Webb

This was my moment of glory - hooorah! I got to stand up and address most of the attendees. I was supposed to introduce the last speaker of the day, Matt Webb, but while I was at it, I ask took the opportunity to tell everyone what we had coming up at Opera, including our developer tools, new versions of desktop and Mobile, dev.opera.com, my upcoming beginner's web design course, and open the web. It seemed to go pretty well - I got a couple of laughs, and a couple more university contacts out of it, which was great.

Matt's talk was how I expected it to be - pretty abstract, bordering on surreal in places, but very well delivered and inspiring. He talked about how user experiences and web development techniques are evolving, and gave some of his ideas on future workflow applications, molded on GTD theory, and a prototype web-enabled radio he is building.

Evening

The evening was nice - first up was the speakers and sponsors meeting in John's room. I saw Jeff Croft, which was cool - he had come up to join in the festivities (he now works for Blue Flavor in Seattle - I didn't know that!) I talked to him, Brian Fling, and Brian's wife about all manner of cool stuff, like Rock Band (we can't wait to have that in the UK.) I also talked to Kimberley Elam some more, and the Happy Webbies guys. They want to do a series of browser vendor Happy Webbies, to commemorate "the new browser wars" ;-)

We had dinner in the hotel, along with David, John, Derek and his wife, Indi Young, Alvin, Cam from WDN, and Kimberley; we then went to the party, which wasn't quite as crazy as I expected, but hey, maybe that was a good thing!

My best memories of the party were:

• Talking to Ricky Onsman for ages about Australian universities, and acting, and busking, and all sorts of other cool stuff
• Talking to Craig Saila's wife about art (she has very similar art leanings to my girlfriend Kirsty)
• Hanging out with Jeff from Further Ahead (is it Jeff? again, terrible with names) and Luxury Luke and talking about music and all kinds of other fun stuff
• A really drunk guy coming up to me and starting to rant about how he loved us because we stood up to MS with the EC complaint thing, and how it was time someone spoke out against them...shazam ;-)

The beer seemed to stop being served far too early, but Dustin Diaz and his girlfriend invited me back to her flat to indulge in some more festivities, which was cool. We chatted mainly about Burning Man experiences, then it was time to hit the road.

Friday

Friday - before getting on the plane home in the afternoon, I did some work, and went comic shopping! I managed to find Golden Age Collectables, which is simply one of the biggest and most comprehensive comic book shops I've ever seen. I mean Wow. I picked up some pretty well-priced Sandman, Preacher, and Transmetropolitan books to last me the journey home.