WDS Day One: Recap-o-rama!

Web Directions is over for another year, so here is my annual brain-dump of interesting tidbits from the sessions I attended this year. I'll try to be a little more brief than in previous years.

Lynne D Johnson - Opening Keynote

Lynne spoke about the decline of the print industry in the face of rising new media. Having worked for a newspaper group for a number of years, I know how big an issue this can get with the traditional print industry. Since the web took off in the mid-nineties, many smaller publishers have always been scared that releasing their product online will eat into their subscriptions and sales, and sadly, not much has changed since then. The newspaper group I used to work for charges a (hefty, IMHO) premium in order to read the newspaper online, which I feel is a big step away from what the web is trying to achieve. Lynne's presentation highlighted the fact that technology is not-only the medium with which content is distributed, but it can also BE the actual media, as the Twitters, Diggs and blogs of the world have shown. Print is a dying product, but it can be saved. Print needs to evolve in order survive. Lynne believes that the print product will continue to exist as a premium product for long-form articles such as expert essays and novels. After her presentation, John Allsopp announced the first issue of the new Scroll magazine which intends to do just that. This first issue, short-run mag was included in the goodie bag, so it should be interesting if this venture takes off.

Kay Smoljak - Starting and running a Web Development Business

Kay and her partner worked for 7 years for a big agency before realising that things weren't really moving forward for them. This sounded very familiar to myself a few years back so I understood where she was coming from. Kay offered up little tidbits of advice she's leaned over the past two years of running her own business, Clever Starfish. She advised to hire an accountant and use a proper accounting system like Quicken, MYOB or an online system like Net Accounts, or FreshBooks. Choosing a business name can be a fun experience, but there are a a number of things to consider such as branding, domain availability and whether you name locks you into one area. Finding the right people when hiring new employees can be difficult, especially when running your business from home, as you'll need to find someone to fit with your business culture and trust.

Developing for the iPhone - Tim Lucas and Pete Ottery

SHITDANGS! Best acronym of the conference. I can't quite remember what it stands for; something like Super Hot Internet-Type Device And Next Gen Something... I dunno. I'll look it up later. (Update: see comments) Although the iPhone has Safari, surfing the web with Safari on the iPhone is not always a good experience, taking into account download times and screen resolution. You want your users to get the best experience for their device. Don't try to force a particular view on your users. You can use a user agent detect and redirect to a mobile version on the homepage, but this should be in it's own url (eg iphone.domain.com) so the view persists as the user browses around the site. Also, go easy on the animation and transitions. Subtlety works best for these. There are also different interaction models to consider, where using the touch-screen is a lot different than using a mouse. Thumb/finger sizes should allow for a 50x50pixel area for buttons and links. Also, don't forget you've got the full CSS3 support of the WebKit rending engine for nice stuff like rounded corners and drop shadows. At the end, Pete shared some trend statistics of news.com.au's mobile site compared with the iPhone site, and interestingly, usage actually increased on weekends on the iPhone site in opposite contrast to their main site, highlighting how the iPhone is used differently to traditional mobile devices.

Learning to Love Javascript Libraries

Craig Sharkie, Cameron Adams, Ben Askins, Jason Crane & Earle Castledine

This was a double-session, however I really wanted to catch Jeff Croft's presentation, so I only stayed until the half-way point, which is sad because I'd heard that the rest of the session was really good. The panel format is a new concept for Web Direction, but it looks like it was fairly successful so we'll probably see more of these next year. It started off with a number of mini-presentations, then showed some examples of different Javascript libraries (MooTools didn't get a mention which is sad, because it's a brilliant little library) before putting them head-to-head in a series of exercises, with Cameron Adams representing pure Javascript in his usual witty style. Cameron took advantage of the internet connection on the panel to work a joke into his code examples while waiting his turn to speak. Classic! This session also marked the first Rickrolling I'd experienced at the conference.

Jeff Croft - Elegant Web Typography

Effective typography should be attractive enough to make it want to be read, but it should never get in the way of enabling the reader to read the content clearly. Many supposedly hard-and-fast rules about typography are antiquated. Jeff pointed out the old 62.5% trick for making relative text sizing easier. This involves resetting the base font size to 62.5%, which in most browsers brings it down to around 10 pixels. This makes it easier to develop and maintain relative sizing. eg. 1.6em becomes 16px, 2.4em becomes 24pix, and so on. When it comes to line-length, apparently 30-50ems (40-70 characters or 7 to 12 words per line) is the magic range for easy readability. Finally, Jeff said that fully justified tex on the web is almost always a bad idea, unless you're awesome like Cameron Moll. A few resources for more information: Duckwizard.com's client-side hyphenation library, and SmartyPants by John Gruber for smart punctuation on the web.

Predicting the Past - August de los Reyes

August de los Reyes is the creative director for the Windows Platform Core Innovation team which is working on Microsoft Surface. There was actually a Surface prototype available to play with in between session on the expo floor, which was a bit of fun. The presentation opened with a very impressive promo reel for how Microsoft predicts how surface technology could be used in the future. In fact, the presentation was a little promo-heavy, but this was forgivable due to August's very insightful ideas and liberal use of humour. I was padded out a little in the middle with an almost three minute clip from an episode of Seinfeld that didn't have a great deal to do with the rest of the talk. The talk was mostly about being able to predict user interaction models of the future by understanding human patterns and behaviours of the past. A successful user interface ensures that the system output must always be greater than the user input. This is what creates the magic! First we had the CLI, then the GUI. Surface is trying to achieve "NUI" which is a Natural User Interface. The next step should have the user interface as an extension of our selves.