Eclectic Brain Salad

Introduction

I've just got back from An Event Apart Boston, and I must say I was impressed. The food, the location, the company, the content - all great. There was a nice variation of content, from fairly technical to inspirational and fluffy, and it wasn't the cheapest conference I've been to, but as Mr Meyer commented to me at one point - they wanted to provide a good experience at each step. My stay in Boston was characterised by great food, great learning, and double entendres...

Below I'll look at the talks I sat in, and mention other highlights. There are some talks not mentioned below, but this certainly doesn't mean I didn't like them - there were a couple of talks that I missed because I had urgent work matters to attend to and got Bruce to sit in on.

Sunday 22 June

My journey to this conference was a strange one. I got up to get an early taxi after being home for approximately 15 hours, got to Manchester airport, got on a plane to Ireland, then...

• Hopped over to Dublin airport on a short flight
• Hopped over to Sharon airport on another short flight
• Got off the plane at Sharon airport and went through US customs!
• Got on the same plane again and carried on to Boston

Phew...

After getting there it wasn't long till I met up with Bruce and Lena, and went out for some lovely food and beer. We also ran into Andy Budd and PPK.

Monday 23 June

After a nice breakfast, we got on with some hardcore learning...

Understanding web standards - Jeffrey Zeldman

Zeldman's talk was an interesting, engaging talk all about our industry, about web designers needing empathy to bridge the gap between what can be done, what clients want, what the results of the ALA survey showed, etc. He also commented on the lack of respect that web designers tend to get, and how that there is a lack of education in web design. This was very interesting for me to hear, given that the first part of our Web Standards Curriculum is just around the corner!

The lessons of CSS frameworks - Eric Meyer

Next up was Eric, looking at all the different CSS frameworks available, including the YUI, That Standards Guy, etc. He had obviously studied them in great detail, looking at what each one offers, and giving advice on what framework is best for you. They all seem to offer CSS resets, colour control, layout choices, and some also offer CSS hack mechanisms, and a few other additional features. There were also some notable differences in the way that certain frameworks do different things, for example some provide access to different layout options through different external stylesheets, and so do it through IDs and classes inside the same giant stylesheet. The latter may seem illogical, but in fact when you have a site with a lot of users, it actually makes more sense to have larger files but reduce numbers of page requests. A pretty scary technical talk in some respects, but nevertheless useful and inciteful.

Good design aint' easy - Jason Santa Maria

Jason's talk was, imo, one of the best of the conference, largely due to him referencing Where the wild things are, and old Atari 2600 video games! But the content was great, basically talking about the web designer being like a narrator, and needing to tell a story and set the mood at each point along the way, for their designs to be effective.

Web application hierarchy - Luke Wroblowski

I'd never encountered Luke before, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but he went on to provide another very high quality talk on design, mainly focusing on how users use web sites, and usability testing. A lot of it reminded me of the kind of stuff Steve Krug presents in his book, but it was still very effectively conveyed and insightful, including studies on how a user's eyes move around the page when using a web site, advice on how to make a site more usable by highlighting the really important parts of the page, making the user's path through the site clear using page element weighting.

Lunch

Lunch was very pleasant, and also included a magic show from Jared Spool's son ;-)

Design and scale - Doug Bowman

Doug's talk was initially a bit long winded, including seemingly endless examples of how scale alters perception, but after he got past this section, he included a good amount of useful material, including good strategies for bulletproofing your web sites, including the 62.5% technique, and some of Dan Cederholm's stuff. It was also very interesting to hear about the scale of Google's applications, and how shaving a few bytes off a page can add up to hundreds of GBs of bandwidth savings if you are dealing with millions of users.

When style is the idea - Chris Fahey

So, there's not really a lot to say about this talk - it was certainly well delivered, engaging and interesting, but it didn't really have much in the way of web design content. He talked about design and art in different contexts, how it evolves and cycles through fashions, and other such things. One tip he mentioned that I really appreciated was the idea that, when you are designing a mobile web application, you should try drawing sketches of the application on paper, and then touching the sketch to emulate using the life-sized application.

Responsible web design - Scott Fegette

This was a pretty evil blatant Dreamweaver sales pitch, but then again I really like Scott, so I don't want to say too much bad about it ;-)

Evening

More beer, more nice food, and more great conversation! We spent most of our time at the Media Temple party, chatting to Scott about music and web design, then headed off to get some more food and drink.

Tuesday 24 June

Slightly sore head this morning, but that still didn't stop me from making breakfast and the first talk - woo hoo!

Debug/Reboot - Eric Meyer

This was certainly one of the most useful technical talks of the conference - I've never seen such a detailed treatment of this kind of CSS technique before. The idea is that you use CSS to not only reboot your site, by using a reset stylesheet, but also debug it by using various different selectors to highlight bugs in your markup and style. For example, you can use a simple attribute selector and a negation selector to highlight image elements that don't have alt attributes - img:not([alt]) { ... }. It is a good tip to use outline rather than border for highlights so that they do not affect the layout. The one issue with the former is that IE doesn't support it. Eric also highly recommended using Dean Edwards' IE 6 fixing JavaScript, to make your lives easier.

Unobtrusive JavaScript - PPK

Next, PPK stepped up to the plate, to give a really decent exploration of unobtrusive JavaScript - he included lots of good solid sensible advice, for example never ever let your scripts assume anything such as JavaScript being available. Always make JavaScript so that if it can't be used, the page still provides usable baseline functionality. He also talked about the mobile web meaning that JavaScript support can vary wildly across devices, and make lots of nice mentions of Opera ;-)

Standards in the enterprise - Kim Blessing

Kimmy's talk was very useful - talking about strategies to get standards implemented inside organizations. She wasn't just talking about web standards either; she was talking about any standards you can think of that would be useful, including coding standards, naming conventions, interaction patterns, etc. These are of course good for consistency, maintenance, user experience, and many other things. She talked about how to get passionate people inside your company to fight for standards. This is all great - my one criticism is that it was a bit long winded, and I think she could have possibly delivered her points in about half the time. You can't fault her enthusiasm and passion however.

Lunch

Again, lunch was totally lovely, and it was nice to talk to some interesting people and eat some award winning chowder (or should that be chou-da in Boston?)

Designing the user experience curve - Andy Budd

You know, you really can't fault Andy - I think he is a fantastic speaker and a great storyteller. He's funny and charismatic, and really keeps the audience's attention while delivering useful advice. (He's also paying me a lot of money to say this ;-). Anyway, his talk was all about the user experience, and how to increase it beyond functional, towards the realms of pleasurable. He looked at examples like hotel services, Apple products, shopping and the little fly transfers you get to aim at in the toilet bowls of the toilets in Amsterdam Schipol airport. First impressions are everything - certainly great advice. The classic quote of the talk was "unboxing an Apple product is like undressing your girlfriend".

Designing the next generation of web apps - Jeff Veen

Lost for words - Veen is one of the best speakers I've ever seen, and he never fails to entertain and inspire. He started talking about history, including his childhood, Kiss, and early pong arcade machines, leading on to some great interaction design examples and advice.

A critique apart - Jeffrey Zeldman

This last session was nice and light-hearted, and basically consisted of people being drawn out of a hat to win a prize but also get their site critiqued by Zeldman.

Evening

We had a really nice chilled last evening - went out for Sushi with Eric Meyer and enjoyed great food, geeky conversation (I love talking about the differences between UK and US language, although the conversation about really early computers lost me slightly...we also talked about Eric's proposed extensions to html 5 and whether Opera would support them) and Sake. We then had a wander to the Bukowski bar with Ethan Marcotte and another couple of guys, drank another couple of beers, and then called it a night...I was already so tired after the meal that I could barely keep my eyes open.

Wednesday 25 June

It was nice to get a bit of work done in the morning, meet up with Bruce, Christopher Schmitt (thanks for the food, dude) and PPK for lunch, and then go on a nice little shopping spree before catching a mid afternoon flight home. I had a great time, but it felt really good to get home, see my family, and celebrate my 30th birthday!