Chris Mills

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!

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The Highland Fling 2008

Tuesday, 8. April 2008, 08:45:56

thehighlandfling08, conference, 2008, standards ...

This was an exciting conference for me - not only was it held in Edinburgh, one of my favourite cities, but it was also the first real proper conference I have ever spoken at! I would like to say a big thank you from the heart to Alan, Dave, Roan, and everyone else who helped pull this together, for looking after us so well. It was a really great conference, and I think the discussions were very useful and rewarding. I would also like to say a big thanks to the other speakers - Paul, Norm, Christian, Gareth, Aral and Simon - for being such lovely people and giving me encouragement and support (well, Christian mainly mocked me and told bad jokes, but I know he means well ;-)

Wednesday April 4th

After getting some work done and dropping our son off at his grandparents house for few days, we (we being the delectable Kirsty and I) made our way up to Edinburgh on the train. I fortunately managed to find a seat with a power socket, so I could do some more work on my presentation. It is amazing how many mistakes there are to fix and tweaks there are to make, even after going through the presentation material several times!

After getting to Edinburgh, we got a taxi over to the wonderful luxury apartment (bigger than our whole house...) that we shared with Simon, and Aral and Stephanie for the duration. After saying hi and stopping for a brew, we made our way over to a really nice curry house for the speakers dinner, where we ate an enormous amount of spicy food with the organizers and the other speakers. Yum.

Thursday April 5th

The big day! We got there with a few minutes to spare, got settled in, listened to Alan introduce the day, and then it was time for our compère, Mr Paul Boag, to take the stage. He explained the format for the day, which really worked in my opinion - I'd like to see it used more at future conferences. Basically, each talk lasted for about 40 minutes. During this time, Paul wrote down some of his own thoughts and questions, and also collected questions from the audience via paper, text, and Twitter. At the end of the sessions, he interviewed each speaker using those questions. It made for some really nice discussions, and also cut out that horrible thing you normally get at conferences where someone will stand up and ask a painfully specific long winded question that is not of much interest to anyone else except them, and lasts half as long as the whole talk itself!

The first speaker up was Norm.

Mark Norman Francis - The browser and before

Norm gave a very interesting account of the history of the web, leading up to the present day. It was a very fitting first talk for the day, which set the scene nicely. He went through the really early days of the Internet, including ARPANET, early work by Joseph Lechleider, Tim Berners Lee and his work at CERN, early clients such as Gopher and NCSA Mosaic, and how Netscape and MS started and finished the browser wars. He also looked at more recent developments, including Firefox, Ajax, and frameworks and libraries. A very interesting statement that he rounded off his talk with is "The Web IS change" - referring to developer knowledge and skillsets. One very amusing piece of information that I never knew before is that Joseph Lechleider's original name for what became the Internet was "The Intergalactic Computer Network" - this guy certainly aimed high ;-)

Christian Heilmann - Sharing the joy; building badges for distribution

Christian always managed to deliver a good talk; today was certainly no exception. His talk mostly centered on how we can improve distribution of data through badges and APIs. The success of a lot of modern web apps is down to how you can distribute your data on to other sites by use of badges, eg Flickr and Youtube. The modern web is a web of data, and people want to be free to distribute their data. He talked about how we can use this data better, and how we should think about allowing people more power to do this more easily, if we are actually involved in creating APIs.

Gareth Rushgrove - Being a first class web citizen

Gareth's talk was a very interesting step through how to take advantage of some of the lesser known features of the Web, as well as some good tips for maximising efficiency of APIs. He started by stating that some people browse the Web using a web browser, but somme people don't - they use code. Some people aren't even people - they are robots (either physical robots, or automated programs such as web spiders) or even rabbits (the Nabaztag, anyone?) So what is a designer to do?

The answer - Understand APIs, to make it as easy as possible for you to manipulate the web of data we now deal with. "The API is the product."

First of all, make better use of HTTP. There are the GET and POST methods that everyone knows, but what about HEAD, PUT, TRACE, DELETE and OPTIONS? These could do some work for you (eg authentication) that you'd otherwise have to put on a higher layer of the stack. Why do this work twice?

Next, understand status codes better. Everyone knows 404 and 500, but what about the 200 success code, or the 503 service unavailable code?

Next he covered understanding URLs, and the fact that URL design is becoming more important. URLs are an important part of the UI of your application - they are the entry point to a site for a visitor, and are also a logical navigation tool if done right.

Lastly, he gave some rules for APIS. They should be:

Proddable - eg you can use Curl to query APIs, to find out things about the data they carry, etc.
Hackable - eg can you replace parts of the URL to get to different pages?
Multilingual - some you can convert between different data types etc
Open
Transparent
Obvious - document your APIs! Don't make people guess how to use them.

Lunch

Lunch was fairly uneventful, and it gave me some time to gather up some courage for my talk, which was coming next!

Me! - The mobile perspective

I think my talk went fairly well, especially for my first conference speaking engagement, and a few people said they though it went great afterwards. Everyone laughed at my jokes, and I didn't seem to stumble on my words, or forget anything. Plus it was entertaining freaking Paul out during the interview section, by lounging on the sofa in a kind of pseudo-porn star pose ;-)

I went through the basics of how the mobile web development landscape differs from "normal" web development, and what extra considerations you need to make, then I looked at device constraints and advantages, and some techniques for optimizing mobile sites. It gave me lots of good opportunities to plug Opera products, and the Web standards curriculum. And the interview section afterwards was useful, with some good discussion going about how to sell the mobile web to clients.

If you want a copy of my slides, e-mail me at cmills [at] opera [dot] com. Also check out my Think Vitamin article on mobile web development.

Aral Balkan - Barenaked Flash: Dispelling myths and building bridges

As always, Aral proved to be a very entertaining speaker, full of charisma and insight. I've seen him speak many times, and never seen him give a bad talk. Aral shares my interest in trying to get the Flash and standards communities to work more closely together, and that was the basic gist of this talk - he showed what is available in the Flash world these days, and debunked a load of myths, for example Flash being inaccessible (there are steps you can take these days to make Flash more accessible) and Flash being proprietary/closed (it start off like that, but with the amount of open source tools available these days, it is anything but - the actual Flash player is the only thing Adobe strictly controls.) He ended with a nice comment about how to teach Flashers better practices learned from the standards world - don't just stand around and moan at them - engage and educate them, and hopefully they can do the same to you.

Simon Willison - Comet: Moving towards a real time web

To round off the day, Simon presented on Comet which is a blanket term for any technique that involves the server pushing events on to connected browsers. Examples you can see today include Google Mail, the Google Chat browser window, and Google Spreadsheets (try opening two instances of a Google spreadsheet on different computers and making some updates, and you'll see the updates occur on both instances in real time.)

There was early Comet style functionality as far back as Netscape 1.1, in the form of client pull and server push, but achieving Comet across the Web wasn't really explored until later on. Simon explained that achieving it really was a grim, harsh battle between the developers and the browser - to illustrate this, he used a hilarious movie poster of "Zeppelin versus Pterodactyls"!

There were a series of problems in winning the battle:

The first major issue is IE not making xhr:responseText available until after the page has finished loading. This was overcome using a hidden iFrame.
The next two problems were the throbber (ie the graphic that pulses while a request is loading - this never seems to stop if you are you are doing Comet-style activity) and the click (ie the click that happens after a request loads.) These were overcome using a COMPLETELY undocumented ActiveX extendsion called htmlfile. Not sure how - I was a bit lost by this point in the presentation!
Next problem - proxies/firewalls stopping the flow of the requests. This is overcome using the long polling technique, which keeps pinging the server, and then intermittantly closing and reopening the connection, to keep the data flowing.
Lastly, there is a problem caused by the 2 connection limit inherent in IE (IE8 apparently will have a 6 connection limit, making this problem go away.)

And this is just on the client-side. The server-side problems are much worse! Standard servers such as IIS and Apache are just not set up to handle thousands of requests at once, but there are solutions available to this in various languages, such as Twisted in Python. And there are also standard protocols created for Comet, such as Bayeux and cometd. The future is looking bright for Comet too, with built in support for it in HTML5 - <event-source src="/comet">

Simon rounded off the talk by showing a demo of how you can build up a Comet application in under 5 minutes. Great talk.

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@Media Ajax, London, November 19-20th 2007

Monday, 26. November 2007, 10:31:30

conference, javascript, ajax, atmediaajax

With Future of Mobile and a trip to the land of the Opera vikings behind me, I focused (in a zen, Yoda meets Gandhi kind of style) on my next prize - Patrick Griffiths and co's new Ajax focussed conference. It was interesting to see this, as I was kind of under the impression that the Ajax craze had died and gone to heaven a little while ago, and people were now focusing on actual real functionality as opposed to just buzzwords...but it seems I was wrong - I should have guessed after reading uncov ardently for the last few weeks.* ;-)

*Ok, I was feeling in a cynical mood today, and I'd just like to state that this should in no way reflect on the actual conference itself - it was really cool, and it is good to see some people really concentrating on fixing the issues we have with Ajax...but there are still some people that care more about the buzzwords and the zippy effects than the actual functionality and usability.

There was a lot of great content in this conference, and it seemed very nicely organized - what follows is a round up of the talks.

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The Future of Mobile, London, November 14th 2007

Thursday, 22. November 2007, 13:34:23

conference, mobile, opera, futureofmobile ...

What follows is my report on the first Future of Mobile conference, held in the rather plush BFI IMAX cinema in Waterloo, London. Obviously at Opera we care a great deal about the mobile web, so I was looking forward to seeing what the overall feeling would be about this rather nascent area of web development/design.

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On the road again - Future of Mobile, then Oslo, then @Media Ajax, then Yahoo!, then Star Wars!

Tuesday, 13. November 2007, 09:38:38

conference, opera, @mediaajax, futureofmobile ...

"I got my wheels I got my friends we're on the road again. We're all crazy gonna ride until we die!"

I was thinking about what I was going to write for this post while in the shower, and I just couldn't get the above Manowar lyrics out of my head. The track is called "Return of the Warlord". from the album "Louder than Hell," which is one of the best driving albums you will ever hear, provided you can make it past the cheese overload.

Anyhow, I'm away for a total of 9 days - first of all I'm heading down from the grim, frostbitten wastes of the North of England to London, where I'm sharing a couple of beers with my good friend Hugo, then heading to the Future of Mobile, Ryan Carson's latest effort, which looks like it should be good - it's got a few notables speaking, like Brian Fling and Luca Passani, as well as our very own Charles McCathie Nevile. It's certainly very relevant to Opera - expect a report on the day soon.

After that I'm headed over to Oslo to spend a couple of days ~~drinking~~ working with my Opera compadres, and giving a presentation to the company; a bit nerve racking, but it's good to get my speaking experience up.

Last of all I'll be heading back to London again, to spend a couple of days at @Media Ajax, chilling and talking tech with the likes of Christian and Norm from Yahoo, the magical Robert Nyman, PPK and of course, the ubiquitous Jeremy Keith (who is now to conferences what Jimmy Carr is to TV panel game/chat shows! I think this illustrates the effect of being in demand.)

Oh, and before I head back up North to remind my family what I look like, I am spending a day at the Yahoo! UK office, chatting to them about various stuff - should be fun!

Then I get back to Oldham, spend about a day at home, and then go back to London again, to see the big Star Wars exhibition! Looking forward to it loads!

FIN.

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