Web Directions Podcast

Learn how to build high performance Internet and web applications with Node.js. In is session Tom Hughes-Croucher will demonstrate how to quickly build a high performance chat server using Node.js. This live coding exercise will provide a real insight into what it looks like to build a project in server-side Javascript. We will also cover how to deploy Node applications in production and look at just how far Node can really scale… A million connections and beyond? Tom Hughes-Croucher is the Chief Evangelist at Joyent, sponsors of the Node.js project. Tom mostly spends his days helping companies build really exciting projects with Node and seeing just how far it will scale. Tom is also the author of the O’Reilly book "Up and running with Node.js". Tom has worked for many well known organizations including Yahoo, NASA and Tesco. Follow Tom on Twitter: @sh1mmer Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

HTML5 Video has been a hot topic for the last couple of years - but with new additions to the specification, we can now extend it beyond all recognition. In this session we’ll look at basic timed data, closed captioning and more - and as we adventure into more sophisticated uses of the technology, we’ll explore what additional value timed data can provide to your video, with attention paid to how you can implement it today. The key focuses of this session will be accessibility, searchable media, and enriching existing multimedia experiences with timed data, all with a liberal application of flashy eye-candy. And of course we’re using the freshly minted Timed Text Track specification, soon appearing in a browser near you! Christopher Giffard is a full stack web developer at the Department of Education, Employment, and Workplace Relations in Canberra. He’s somewhat new to the government, having a career background as a web guy in graphic design and advertising agencies - but hopes to bring a slice of that mad, informal world to the Australian public service. He gets a kick out of solving problems everybody else avoids, has a soft spot for architecture and design, is particularly interested in electronic music, and the algorithmic generation thereof. His current secret project involves natural language processing--and sarcasm detection. Follow Christopher on Twitter: @cgiffard Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Learn how to build great looking and high performance mobile web applications leveraging CSS3 animations and Backbone.js, along with some cool use cases for geolocation and localStorage. This session will describe in length a boilerplate you can use for developing your own apps aimed at A grade mobile devices and tablets. Julio has been a full-stack software developer for the 12 years of his career, and during this time he went from being a GNU/Linux and Unix sysadmin, to a VoIP PBX architect, and finally a software developer. Since moving to Australia from Brazil, he has worked on startups and companies building software and at the same time, stuck his nose as much as he can into the human side of the software equation, understanding developer productivity, how software companies work, and product development. More recently he grew too interested in design for his own good, and began freelancing under the codename of Awesome By Design, writing a bunch of software which he open sourced on GitHub, giving presentations using his own presentation framework, and building software that not only does the job, but does so in style. Follow Julio on Twitter: @julio_ody Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

The Australian War Memorial is connecting and enriching online archives and collections toward building a platform for telling history. Through Drupal 7 and Linked Data, the Memorial intends to develop tools that designers, researchers and historians can use to help find new ways of building historical narratives. During this session we will demonstrate some early prototypes and experiments, key uses of Linked Data, practical publishing tools and discuss how this work is unfolding inside one of Australia’s major collecting institutions. Adam Bell leads the web production team at the Australian War Memorial, where he works with curators and historians to publish the Memorial’s vast archives and collections online. He has a background as an artist, cultural worker, teacher and printmaker and plays in a rock n roll band. Follow Adam on Twitter: @bumphead David Peterson has been pushing at the boundaries of Web development since 1995; that combined with a background in wildlife cinematography brings fresh insight into what can be a geeky sort of space. He has built a number of high profile sites for the ABC, Australian science groups and many others. David works as a consultant with PreviousNext and lives way down south in cool Tasmania - regularly breathing on his fingers just to tap away at the keyboard. He is busy building Web apps built with Open Source toolkits utilising Java, PHP, Python, Linked Data and the almighty Drupal. He enjoys exploring deep into the guts of the Semantic Web and Linked Data to discover new connections and visualisations that help empower story tellers. Follow David on Twitter: @davidseth Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

WCAG2 is a long series of documents. Gian Wild knows this better than most: she spent six years on the W3C WCAG Working Group writing them. It’s a lot to ask that every developer and project manager read the complete guidelines, including informative content. However there are some very useful - and sometimes hidden - techniques in WCAG2. And some are even at Level AAA. Join Gian to find out what these are. Gian has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998 and consulted on the development of the first Level AAA accessible web site in Australia (Disability Information Victoria). She has worked with the Disability Services arm of the Victorian Government for over thirteen years to keep the four iterations of the Disability Services site (Disability Information Victoria, Disability Services, Disability Online and DiVine), Level AAA accessible. She ran the accessibility consultancy PurpleTop from 2000 to 2005 and built the accessibility tool, PurpleCop. Follow Gian on Twitter: @accessibilityoz Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Mozilla is dedicated to ensuring that competition and innovation thrive on the Internet. In the last decade we rescued the Web from a near-monopoly and restored competition to the browser market. Now the standards-based Web platform is evolving rapidly - mostly in a good direction - and is defeating some of its competitors, such as proprietary browser plugins. However, it faces fresh challenges, in particular, single-vendor platforms for mobile devices that are attracting application developers away from the Web platform. In this talk I will describe the work we’re doing to ensure that the standards-based Web wins again - developing new technologies, extending Web standards, and shipping great products on all kinds of devices. I’ll talk about the challenges we face and what people who care about competition and freedom can do to help. Robert O’Callahan has been trying to save the world by contributing to Mozilla since 1999. In 2005 he left a career in computer science research at IBM to move back to New Zealand and work full-time for Mozilla, building up an Auckland development office (which is hiring!). He works on the Gecko engine that powers Firefox, focusing on layout, rendering, and media. He manages the video and media team, but prefers coding. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

The key idea of the Semantic Web is to make information on the Web easily consumable by machines. As machines start to understand web pages as sources of data that can be easily combined with other public data on the Web, the promise is that search on the Web will move well beyond the current paradigm of retrieving pages by keywords. Instead, search engines will start to answer complex queries based on the cumulative knowledge of the Web. In this presentation, we overview the basic set of technologies that can be used to annotate web pages so that they can be processed by data-aware search engines. In particular, we discuss the RDFa and microdata standards of the W3C designed for marking up data in HTML pages. We look at the ways in which this information is currently used by search engines, including the latest schema.org collaboration between Bing, Google, and Yahoo!, which provides a basic set of vocabulary items understood by all three major search engines on the Web. Peter Mika is a researcher and data architect at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, working on the applications of semantic technology to Web search. He received his BS in computer science from Eotvos Lorand University and his MSc and PhD in computer science (summa cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His interdisciplinary work in social networks and the Semantic Web earned him a Best Paper Award at the 2005 International Semantic Web Conference and a First Prize at the 2004 Semantic Web Challenge. From 2006 to 2009, he has been a co-chair of the Semantic Web Challenge. Mika is the youngest member elected to the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. He is the author of the book ‘Social Networks and the Semantic Web’ (Springer, 2007). In 2008 he has been selected as one of "AI’s Ten to Watch" by the editorial board of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal. Peter is a regular speaker at conferences. Follow Peter on Twitter: @pmika Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Augmented Reality lets you peel away the blinkers from your real world eyes to see the rich data and information that exists all around you. But up until now it has relied largely on proprietary tools and standards. Finally, we’re close to being able to augment our world using web technologies. Soon this will be a common part of the web browsing and mobile device experience. Now is the time to look at these future trends and the state of a specific list of API standardisation activities and the forces shaping them. We’ll also look at the current obstacles, risks and issues to explore what may prevent this landscape from evolving as it appears it will. This presentation aims to document the AR standardisation efforts over the last few years as well as what’s possible right now and in the near future from a distinctly web-based perspective. Rob is the Managing Director and co-founder of MOB, an innovative R&D lab based in Sydney. He regularly presents on mobile, AR and future technology developments. He is a co-founder of http://AR-UX.com & http://ARStandards.org and is an invited expert on the W3C’s Points of Interest Working Group. Rob is not just a spectator when it comes to the future of technology, he’s actively working to shape it. And he’s been doing this though building web based startups in Sydney since 1994. Follow Rob on Twitter: @nambor Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Computers are increasingly being held in the hand rather than sitting atop lap or desk. We now have to consider how our products will work underneath a finger instead of a mouse cursor. Increasingly, too, those products are being delivered as native applications, capable of fully exploiting device capabilities. That has ramifications not only for the way those projects get built, but also how we structure the businesses that support them. In this session, Michael Honey and Tim Riley answer the question 'web or native?' from business, product design and development perspectives. They cover the current state of web technology on modern devices and compare it to what’s available through native development platforms. They’ll look at web, native and hybrid strategies successfully employed by Australian and international businesses, and share their own stories as mobile and web developers. Finally, they’ll offer practical guidance on picking a strategy for web or native development that best suits your needs - as either a developer or a client. Tim and Michael are two of the partners behind Icelab, an Australian design and development studio. They’ve trod both the web and native paths through their client work, such as interactive touchscreens for museum exhibits, online photo galleries and mobile tour guides, and also their own projects, like Decaf Sucks, a coffee review community available on the web (optimised for both desktops and smartphones) and as a native iPhone app. Michael founded Icelab after a career as creative director and later, interactive director in an agency environment. He has fifteen years’ experience in design for screen, print, video and exhibition spaces, and has expertise in writing, programming, direction and post-production. He is an experienced coder, with a particular interest in algorithmic animation and datavisualisation. He is also experienced in the development of diagrammatic animations for cultural, engineering, scientific and architectural clients. Michael’s interests include architecture, urbanism, and the environment. Follow Michael on Twitter: @michaelhoney Tim is a partner at Australian design and development studio Icelab, where he builds excellent web and mobile applications using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Cocoa, and occasionally out of popsicle sticks. On alternate days he runs Decaf Sucks, an online community for coffee reviews, and RentMonkey, which contains the greatest on the Internet. Tim is an active participant in the Australian web and iOS communities, as a regular speaker at the Sydney Ruby on Rails meetings, organiser of the Canberra Ruby Crew, and part of the Canberra Cocoaheads chapter. Tim loves coffee and hates gluten. Follow Tim on Twitter: @timriley Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

The application of web accessibility guidelines in a holistic manner across all roles of a web team continues to encounter resistance. This is often due to a lack of resources and knowledge, or no sense of relevancy in certain web roles. While there is solid support of the guidelines by accessibility activists and many front-end developers, a large percentage of other web practitioners in non-technical roles do not know how to integrate accessible design practices into their daily work, despite wanting to. By re-categorising accessibility guidelines into role-based groupings, such as visual design, content writing and information architecture, guidelines become more accessible to inexperienced web practitioners across a broad range of web roles. The application of accessibility guidelines then becomes more integrated and holistic, thereby reducing project timelines and costs while increasing the overall accessibility of a site from initial design stages. This method enables practitioners to apply skills specific to their role to a narrow range of accessibility guidelines particular to their area of expertise. For example, the visual designer would create a design and evaluate colour contrast before submitting the design to the development team. Likewise, an interaction designer would consult with the Javascript specialist to ensure the menu design satisfies relevant accessibility guidelines. Lisa is the Director and Principal Consultant at Scenario Seven, an Inclusive Design Consultancy based in Sydney. With 15 years experience on the web, the past 10 years of her work has centred on design research, usability, accessibility and inclusive strategies. Lisa is best known for her role based approach to web accessibility, which has seen the re-categorisation of WCAG checkpoints into a user-centred, practitioner-focused grouping for content developers, visual designers, developers and user experience professionals. Scenario Seven specialises in creating accessible, inclusive design strategies that integrate holistically with traditional user research practices. This includes anything from requirements gathering to the review of design documentation (functional specs, wireframes & visual designs), user research and WCAG compliance. We design for diversity. Follow Lisa on Twitter: @scenariogirl Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Natalie and Simon launched the first version of Lanyrd.com while on honeymoon in Casablanca. As the site took off, they realised their side project was destined to become something much bigger. This talk will tell the story of Lanyrd, from a two-week proof of concept to a full-fledged startup via three intensive months of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. They’ll share the trials, tribulations and lessons they learned along the way. This is the talk they wish they’d heard before they got started! Natalie co-founded Lanyrd on her honeymoon with her husband Simon. Before co-founding a startup, she worked as a senior client-side engineer at Clearleft in Brighton, UK. Today, she juggles leading design, client-side engineering and UX on the project with building the company. If Natalie had any time for hobbies, she would enjoy pottery, yoga, writing and flying her kite. Follow Natalie on Twitter: @Natbat Simon is a co-founder of Lanyrd, and co-creator of the Django web framework. Prior to diving in to the world of entrepreneurship, Simon built crowdsourcing and database journalism projects for the Guardian newspaper in London. Simon is responsible for all of the server-side code on Lanyrd, unsurprisingly written with Django. He is also obsessed with Zeppelins, and hopes one day to build one. Follow Simon on Twitter: @simonw Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Since the early days of the web, the only reliable way to get movement on your site was through Flash, or more recently, Javascript. But now, with WebKit and Mozilla leading the way, transformations and transitions can be done with pure CSS, even on mobile devices. And for those in need of even more movement, CSS3 provides for keyframe-based animations. In this session, we’ll take a look at all of the possibilities and explore what works and where - from the simplest effects, to creative usability enhancements including the combination of CSS with mobile Javascript frameworks. Greg Rewis is the Principal Evangelist for Adobe Systems, focusing on Adobe’s open web products and technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. With over 20 years of computer industry experience, Greg spends in excess of 200 days of the year on the road, talking with customers, giving product demonstrations at seminars, and speaking at industry conferences. Greg has been passionate about the web since putting his first "home page" online in 1994. His career has taken him around the world, from the early days of desktop publishing, to a start-up in Hamburg, Germany, the glory days of the web at Macromedia and finally his current role at Adobe. The original GoLive Cyberstudio Product Manager and former Dreamweaver Technical Product Manager, Greg is the co-author of "Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3" and "Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4" published by New Riders, as well as a regular contributor to industry publications. Follow Greg on Twitter: @garazi Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Change is never a smooth process. How do know when disruption is useful and how do you cope with the feedback on it? Recently news.com.au, a national news website with large numbers of daily visitors, underwent a major upgrade which tore down existing and perhaps "expected" ways of presenting news. At the heart of the redesign was a desire for change that motivated and challenged every aspect of the team’s design thinking and process. In this co-piloted session Simon and Scott will fly you over the territories of change they encountered on the project, ones common to many redesign projects. They’ll descend through the experiences that came out of the redesign: fundamentals like stakeholders, requirements and their process for user experience architect and designer working side by side. Sprinkled with some of the twitter and facebook feedback the project received, they’ll touch down on the sticky issues of dealing with feedback and how to suck it up and utilise passionate user and stakeholder feedback. Scott Bryant is a Senior Experience Architect working on online and cross platform news media and classifieds, most recently for news.com.au within the User Standards and Innovative Technology Team for News Digital Media. He spends his time working across product, design and technology teams utilising design and research to create engaging user experiences for news media. His career began as a visual artist before working in university and local government libraries, and finally into new media. He completed two Masters Degrees, in Media Art and Information Studies (while working as a Project Manager, Content Producer and IA). Upon returning from the US working on the Ask Jeeves innovative search interface he concentrated on User Experience, He continues to lecture casually in information and interaction design at the University of Technology, Sydney. Follow Scott on Twitter: @ScotTheLot Simon Wright is the Art Director of news.com.au, leading the design and front-end development team. He’s responsible for the brand’s design and development across all digital platforms, and also works closely with journalists on new ways to tell stories online. As someone who’s passionate about design, the web, media and well-designed chairs, being a part of a news website’s a near perfect fit (if it was possible to do this while climbing up a rockface, he’d never leave). In a previous life Simon was based in Perth and wore the many hats of small business, mostly the propeller-topped one of designer/front-end dev and sometimes the dull beige hat of The Guy Who Does The Finance. Follow Simon on Twitter: @diversionary Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Let’s start with the assumption that computing and networking are as cheap to incorporate into product designs as plastic and aluminum. Anything can tweet, everything knows about everything. The cloud extends from smart speed bumps to exurban data systems, passing through us in the process. We’re basically there technologically today, and over the next [pick a date range] years, we’ll be there distribution-wise. Here’s the issue: now that we have this power what do we do with it? Yes we can now watch the latest movies on our phones while ignoring the rest of the world (if you believe telco ads) and know more about peripheral acquaintances than you ever wanted. But, really, is that it? Is it Angry Birds all the way down? Of course not. Every technology’s most profound social and cultural changes are invisible at the outset. Cheap information processing and networking technology is a brand new phenomenon, culturally speaking, and quickly changing the world in fundamental ways. Designers align the capabilities of a technology with people’s lives, so it is designers who have the power and responsibility to think about what this means. This talk will discuss where ubiquitous computing is today, some changes we can already see happening, and how we can begin to think about the implications of these technologies for design, for business and for the world at large. Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consulting firm, and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer. He is the author of ‘Observing the User Experience,’ a popular textbook of user research methods, and ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design,’ a guide to the user-centered design of digital products. Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikekuniavsky Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

The Web is a purely magical substance that is built by us, web developers. How can it be that the web is totally technical, yet we all know some kids who we can call magicians of the Web. Some people believe that it’s all about skills, but Dmitry reckons it’s more about bravely, grit and a tiny bit of madness. Do you want to change the Web, not just build it? Do you want to know the secret spells? Do you want to know the source of all this unlimited power? Come and find out. Dmitry has over ten years experience in creating web applications. Having started as a back end developer, more recently he has changed his orientation to front end development and even pure design. He is the creator of Raphaël, the JavaScript Library that simplifies your work with vector graphics on the web, as well as a Optimus, the Microformats transformer. At any given moment he is always working on three secret projects, though no one knows where he gets the time for any of this. Follow Dmitry on Twitter: @DmitryBaranovsk Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Innovation is intensifying off the browser - the things we use everyday are increasingly controlled by touch, gesture and voice. And we, as interaction designers, are faced with a challenge that’s the opposite of our browser-​​based one-​​man-​​shop: there’s suddenly a gulf of production between our concept and the final product; the means of production is as tricky to navigate as a roster of Tolstoy characters; mistakes are expensive; and everyone speaks a different language. Sound dangerous? Sound exciting? Donovan argues the processes for the future lie in our more material-​​based graphic designer pasts, and our cousin disciplines of industrial design and architecture. After a decade of honing our newfangled browser-​​based skills, learn how to dust off and sharpen the tools of our roots. Hannah Donovan is a Canadian interaction designer living in London. She led design at Last​.fm for five years, and before that worked agency-​​side designing digital campaigns. Since leaving Last​.fm this spring, Hannah’s become an independent product designer focused on ways to make music better on the web. When she’s not busy with new work, Hannah contributes to spacelog.org and plays cello with a real orchestra as well as a comedy orchestra. Read an interview with Hannah in Desktop Magazine. Follow Hannah on Twitter: @Han Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Most jaw-dropping apps use multiple HTML5 APIs in creative ways, rather than a single API in isolation. In this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps. Then just for fun we’ll look at how you can dish up something really special by throwing in ingredients like canvas, video and WebGL. Damon Oehlman is an experienced web and mobile applications developer. He has worked with small and large companies to develop software solutions for desktop, web and most recently mobile devices. His first technical book, Pro Android Web Apps, was released earlier this year by Apress. Damon currently runs his own software development and consulting firm Sidelab, which specializes in cross-platform mobile solutions. Damon’s aptly titled tech blog Distractable offers a mix of articles, tutorials and other shiny things. He is a proud dad, husband and one day dreams of owning his own underground lair. Follow Damon on Twitter: @damonoehlman Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

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 basketball, writing for his blog thecssninja.com or committing code to github. Follow Ryan on Twitter: @ryanseddon Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Would you like to learn how to organize your JavaScript applications so they can scale? Be able to write apps that support switching out Dojo or jQuery without rewriting a line of code? Application architecture is one of those aspects to development where minor problems can lead to major issues later on if it isn’t done right. Developers writing client-side apps these days usually use a combination of MVC, modules, widgets, plugins and frameworks for theirs. Whilst this works great for apps that are built at a smaller-scale, what happens when your project really starts to grow?. In this talk, I’ll be presenting an effective set of design patterns for large-scale JavaScript application architecture that have previously been used at both AOL and Yahoo amongst others to develop scalable applications. You’ll learn how to keep your application logic truly decoupled, build modules that can exist on their own independently so they can be easily dropped into other projects and future-proof your code in case you need to switch to a different DOM library in the future. Addy Osmani is a popular JavaScript blogger and a UI Developer for AOL based in London, England. He is also a member of the jQuery [Bug Triage/Docs/Front-end] teams where he assists with bugs, documentation and community updates. His free book, ‘Essential JavaScript Design Patterns’ has been downloaded over 200,000 times in the past year and continues to be expanded in his spare time. For more on Addy’s work, check out his blog AddyOsmani.com for tutorials, his G+ page for his community updates and magazines such as .net for his thoughts and commentaries. Follow Addy on Twitter: @addy_osmani Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

In 2020 there will be nearly 10 times as many Internet connected devices as there are human beings on this planet. The majority of these will not have web browsers. When it comes to the "Internet of Things", web designers and developers are uniquely placed to create, connect and produce innovative new ways for these devices to be used. We are used to mashing up disconnected data sets, playing with APIs and designing for constantly moving standards in order to create compelling digital user experiences. "Old school" engineers are struggling to keep pace due to long processes for product and service design but as web creators we understand the value of rapid prototyping, user feedback and quick iterations. As developers, we play daily with a bewildering array of technologies that span networks, servers and user interfaces. As designers, we understand the nature of beautiful but usable technology. These skills, and our innate understanding of how interconnectedness enhances and creates engaging user experiences, mean that web creators will be critical for the next generation of Internet enabled Things in our world. From a potplant that tweets when it needs water to crowd sourcing pollution data with sensors on people’s windows and visualising it on Google Maps these are the new boundaries of the web creator’s skills. Have you ever dreamt of sending your phone to the edge of space to take a picture of a country? Or how about a robot you can control via a web browser? By exploring examples of things in the wild right now and delving into practical guidance for for getting started, this session will demonstrate how easy it is for web designers and developers to build Internet connected and aware Things. Andrew Fisher is deeply passionate about technology and is constantly tinkering with and breaking something — whether it’s a new application for mobile computing, building a robot, deploying a cloud or just playing around with web tech. Sometimes he does some real work too and has been involved in developing digital solutions for businesses since the dawn of the web in Australia and Europe for brands like Nintendo, peoplesound, Sony, Mitsubishi, Sportsgirl and the Melbourne Cup. Andrew is the CTO for JBA Digital, a data agency in Melbourne Australia, where he focuses on creating meaning out of large, changing data sets for clients. Andrew is also the founder of Rocket Melbourne, a startup technology lab exploring physical computing and the Web of Things. Follow Andrew on Twitter: @ajfisher Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

After a lost decade in the wilderness, JavaScript is starting to change and evolve. We’ll look at CoffeeScript, a little language that compiles into JavaScript, providing concise ways to to write many common JavaScript patterns. We’ll cover syntactic and semantic pain points, polyfills, sugar, and how you can start experimenting with your own flavor of JS. Jeremy Ashkenas is part of the Interactive News team at the New York Times, as well as the lead developer of DocumentCloud, helping news organizations analyze and publish the primary source documents behind the news. He works on CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docco, Jammit, and Ruby-Processing, among other opensource projects. Follow Jeremy on Twitter: @jashkenas Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Yes, business applications can be made fun and gamelike. No, points, levels and badges are not the way to create sustained interest. While many sites have added superficial gaming elements to make interactions more engaging, the companies that "get it" have a better understanding of the psychology behind motivation. They know how to design sites that keep people coming back again and again. So what are the secrets? What actually motivates people online? How do you create sustained interest in your product or service? Speaker Stephen P. Anderson will share common patterns from game design, learning theories, and neuroscience to reveal what motivates-and demotivates-people over the long haul. Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He recently published the Mental Notes card deck to help product teams apply psychology to interaction design. Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops to help businesses design fun, playful and effective online experiences. He’s currently writing a book about “seductive interactions” that will be published by New Riders in 2011. Follow Stephen on Twitter: @stephenanderson Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

The work we’re collectively doing-opening up gradually all of human information and media, making it recombinable, helping people create and share their work-is a huge unspoken, sexy, world-​​​​redefining mission. It’s a mission that many of us have become blasé about, almost unaware of. It’s a project so large that it’s hard to get a grasp on. And the next few years are going to get even more interesting as the network pervades physical objects and environments, sensing and manifesting information in the real world. It’s time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity-even the planet itself-is our canvas. Tom Coates is a technologist and writer who focuses on new product development, the web of data, location services and social software . He’s worked for many of the web’s leading companies, including Time Out, the BBC-where he ran a small R&D team focused on future medi-—and Yahoo! where he was Head of Product for the Brickhouse incubator and developed the Fire Eagle location sharing service. Now independent, he lives in San Francisco and works as a freelance product designer and consultant. Follow Tom on Twitter: @tomcoates Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

We first got server side JavaScript in 1996. This time, we’re going to get it right. Douglas Crockford is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, best known for his ongoing involvement in the development of the JavaScript language, and for having popularized the data format JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). He is currently a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo!, and is also a writer and speaker on JavaScript, JSON, and related web technologies. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Modern JavaScript development often has to address a number of different concerns ranging from the use of architectural patterns such as MVC to improve code organisation, through to JavaScript templating, cross-​​​​browser storage, routing/​​bookmarking, script loading, feature detection and more. In this talk, JavaScript developer and jQuery Core Bug Triage & Docs team member Addy Osmani discusses tools that can simplify your development process significantly. Addy Osmani is a popular JavaScript Blogger and a senior independent developer based in London, England. He is also a member of the jQuery Bug Triage and Front-​​​​end teams where he assists with community updates, releases and bugs. Addy’s passion lies in helping spread knowledge about JavaScript and jQuery best practices, coding techniques and open-​​​​source projects in the community. He achieves this through numerous free online talks, articles and resources which he releases each month. For more on Addy’s work, check out his official website AddyOsmani​.com for tutorials, jQuery​.com for his community updates and magazines such as .NET for his thoughts and commentaries. Follow Addy on Twitter: @addyosmani Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Throughout the years, the Swiss Army Knife has been the trusted companion of scouts and explorers alike, and for front-​​end developers, CSS has been a trusty, if sometimes frustrating, companion. And just as blades, scissors and sundry tools have been added to the Swiss Army Knife, with CSS3, we have new tools and implements of creativity, and some tried and true tools have been honed and sharpened. Of course the key to success is knowing which of the many tools to use and how to wield them in a given situation. Join Stephanie Rewis as she explores some shiny enhancements to favorite old tools like backgrounds and borders, as well as slices and dices with new tools like CSS masks and more! Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis is the founder of W3Conversion, a web design company with a passion for web standards. A front-​​end developer, Stephanie created the CSS Starter Layouts in Dreamweaver CS3 and recently updated for DW CS5. Her passion for sharing knowledge has led her to write books and tutorials, pen a bi-​​monthly column for Web Designer Magazine, train corporate web departments, and speak at numerous conferences. Stephanie is the WaSP liaison to Adobe Systems, working with product managers to ensure the output of its web products continues to move toward today’s web standards. An admitted workaholic who rarely leaves the office, she frequently escapes to talk to the people inside her computer via Twitter. Her hobby, if only she had time? Studying brain function. Her guilty pleasure? Eighties music. Follow Stephanie on Twitter: @stefsull Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

With most browsers adding increasing support, and the simplicity of providing fallbacks for those that don’t, CSS3 gradients are something we can start to use right now. They benefit our users with faster websites and ourselves with more time in our hands to spend in other things, since they are easy to create, edit and update. A very powerful feature that can also be utilized for a surprising number of design effects, even ones that don’t resemble gradients at all. In this talk, Lea will explore CSS3 gradients in great depth and it’s almost guaranteed that no matter your expertise level, you will walk out having learned new things. Lea Verou is a front-​​end engineer currently living in Greece. She discovered programming at the young age of 12 (web development a few years after) and it was love at first ...line. In 2008, she co-​​founded Fresset Ltd, whose websites have attracted a large following in the Greek internet scene, they are currently working frantically on their first international project. Fed up with the lack of proper web development education in Greece, she co-​​organised a university course which teaches all aspects of modern, standards-​​based Web development, including CSS3, HTML5 and ES5 as regular parts of its content. During her spare time, she blogs about CSS, JavaScript and web usability at leaverou​.me. Follow Lea on Twitter: @LeaVerou Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is estimated to produce 15 petabytes of data per year. This is difficult to store let alone understand! With connected devices quickly out numbering connected people, we are soon going to be swamped with data. Visualising the constant stream of information we are collecting so that it can be better understood is going to be a critical task. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through a quick overview of some basic chart and graph design, then look at how easy it is to write some quick scripts in your favourite language to produce beautiful graphics. SVG is an under-​​​​rated technology, but it can be created programmatically and quickly to visualise data. Brian Suda is an informatician residing in Reykjavík, Iceland. He has spent a good portion of each day connected to Internet after discovering it back in the mid-​​1990s. Most recently, he has written a book on the topic of charts and graphs entitled Designing with Data. His own little patch of Internet can be found at suda​.co​.uk where many past projects and crazy ideas can be found. Follow Brian on Twitter: @briansuda Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

There’s little hotter in the world of web development right now than creating optimized web experiences and applications for mobile web enabled devices like iPhone, Android, iPad and webOS. Luckily, there’s a number of excellent HTML/​​CSS/​​Javascript frameworks to help developers create native-​​​​like experiences for these devices. In this session, Jonathan Stark takes an in depth look at several of these, including JQTouch, JQuery Mobile and SenchaTouch, comparing and contrasting their approaches, and most appropriate uses. As a developer looking to tailor experiences and applications for the mobile web, this will be an invaluable session. Jonathan Stark is a mobile and web application consultant who the Wall Street Journal has called an expert on publishing desktop data to the web. He is the author of O’Reilly’s Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is a tech editor for both php|architect and Advisor magazines, and is often quoted in the media on internet and mobile lifestyle trends. Jonathan began his programming career more than 20 years ago on a Tandy TRS-​​80 and still thinks Zork was a sweet game. Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @jonathanstark Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

With HTML5, we can now cache our applications and the data that goes with them. This means our favourite programming platform can now be used to build apps that work offline, survive intermittent downtimes, and gain in performance from cached content. In this session we’ll get hands-​​​​on with the application cache to make the app run when it’s not online. We’ll check out the techniques for client-​​​​side persistence: web storage and indexed database. Finally, we’ll look at the latest techniques for file access - reading and writing files on the user’s hard drive from a web app is being defined by web standards and implemented in today’s modern browsers. Michael Mahemoff is a Chrome Developer Advocate for Google, based in London, always looking at ways to make the web a more habitable place for users and developers alike. He’s been programming on the web since the mid ’90s, in a range of public-​​​​facing and enterprise (Java, what else?) contexts, and is the author of Ajax Design Patterns (O’Reilly, 2006) and a blogger for Ajaxian​.com. Server side, he’s mostly a Ruby, PHP, and NodeJS guy and sushi is his preferred coding fuel. Michael holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, covering software design patterns for improving user experience. Follow Michael on Twitter: @mahemoff Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

A much-​​​​​​hyped feature of HTML5 is native multimedia. In this session we’ll look at embedding. We’ll look at the pros and the cons of HTML5 multimedia and see how to write simple controls with JavaScript. Most excitingly, we’ll also look at how HTML5 builds in support for subtitles and captions for multimedia accessibility. And you might pick up a Turkish dancing tip on the way. Bruce evangelises Open Web Standards for Opera. He’s currently working with the British Standards Institution to draft the new Standard for commissioning accessible web sites and writing a book about HTML5. Previously, he’s been front-​​​​end technical lead for the Law Society and Solicitors Regulation Authority web sites, tutor to a princess’ daughter in Thailand, a movie extra in Bombay, and a tarot card reader in Istanbul. He blogs at brucelawson​.co​.uk, drinks Guinness and is training for a blue belt in kickboxing. Follow Bruce on Twitter: @brucel Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Innovation is intensifying off the browser - the things we use everyday are increasingly controlled by touch, gesture and voice. And we, as interaction designers, are faced with a challenge that’s the opposite of our browser-​​​​based one-​​​​man-​​​​shop: there’s suddenly a gulf of production between our concept and the final product; the means of production is as tricky to navigate as a roster of Tolstoy characters; mistakes are expensive; and everyone speaks a different language. Sound dangerous? Sound exciting? Donovan argues the processes for the future lie in our more material-​​​​based graphic designer pasts, and our cousin disciplines of industrial design and architecture. After a decade of honing our newfangled browser-​​​​based skills, learn how to dust off and sharpen the tools of our roots. Hannah Donovan is a Canadian interaction designer living in London. She led design at Last​.fm for five years, and before that worked agency-​​​​side designing digital campaigns. Since leaving Last​.fm this spring, Hannah’s become an independent product designer focused on ways to make music better on the web. When she’s not busy with new work, Hannah contributes to spacelog​.org and plays cello with a real orchestra as well as a comedy orchestra. Follow Hannah on Twitter: @Han Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

In 1960, Milton Bradley published "The Game of Life": a capitalist wet dream of a board game, won by the lucky one who retired richest. Today, "gamification" vendors still take Milton Bradley seriously. From losing weight to saving Africa, from watching TV to matching DNA sequences: there’s nothing that couldn’t be made more fun by adding points, badges, and other elements from video games. At least that’s the selling proposition. Yet the debate on gamification is deeply split. On the one hand, marketers dream of customer mind control, on the other game designers warn of digital snake oil sellers and shallow ‘pointsification’. How to design a playful experience that is truly meaningful to users - instead of just creating shallow novelty effects? Which lessons do games really hold for other products and services? What criticism is valid? And how can designers interested in "gameifying" an application steer clear of the worst pitfalls? Sebastian Deterding is a designer and researcher usually flown in for some thorough German grumpiness. He speaks and publishes internationally on gameful design, persuasive technology, and the social contexts of games at venues such as the Gamification Summit, Gamescom, reboot, or Google. His work has been covered by The Guardian, the LA Times, The New Scientist, and EDGE Magazine among others. When not designing, he pursues a PhD on the motivational psychology of ‘gameified’ applications at Hamburg University. Follow Sebastian on Twitter: @dingstweets Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

That user who just signed up is about to bail. And a thousand other people just stopped in but didn’t even bother to register. Your product is great, but your users don’t stay long enough to find that out. The first fifteen minutes of your product are the most important and they’re so often squandered. But! We’re starting to figure out what works and what does not. There’s no longer any excuse to give your visitors a poor initial experience. Learn how great user interfaces entice people right out of the gate, then help newcomers get people over the threshold. Then! Great interfaces delightfully provide new users to learn complex systems and become engaged, passionate contributors. Onwards and upwards, friends. Daniel is a user interface designer based in San Francisco by way of Canada. He was the creative director at Digg for several years, he was a co-​​​​founder of a startup called Pownce, he continues as an inactive partner at the design firm silverorange, and he’s designing the UI for a game called Glitch. Daniel is passionate about designing web apps with vibrant communities. Lately, he’s especially interested in using game design techniques to engage users, especially as they learn new and complex systems. Follow Daniel on Twitter: @dburka Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Developers have long been able to use an array of debugging, profiling and other testing tools to ensure application quality and performance. More recently, web developers have started to rely on increasingly sophisticated tools to help test their web sites and applications. But particularly in the mobile space, when developing sophisticated applications with web technologies, testing presents significant challenges. Ross Boucher, one of the developers of Objective-​​J, the Cappuccino web application framework, the visual development tool Atlas, and 280 slides knows a thing or two about testing sophisticated applications developed using web technologies. In this session, he’ll share some of those secretes, and help you better test and debug your applications. Ross Boucher is co-​​founder of 280 North, the organization behind 280 slides and the popular Cappuccino and Atlas frameworks. At 280 North, he splits his time between server and client-​​side code, including the text system in 280 Slides. He has a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from USC. After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Apple on the iTunes Store. His team was responsible for music recommendations, charting, and search. Ross is currently working with his colleagues to create tools that will help everyone build rich applications. Follow Ross on Twitter: @boucher Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

In this session Dave will cover high-​​​​performance presentation and animation using HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3 and Canvas. Examples will include mobile-​​​​friendly techniques you can use today for creating game effects and "flashy" user experiences across a range of browsers and devices. As a Senior Software Engineer with Palm Developer Relations, Dave is a JavaScript guru currently focused on mobile app development. He is the creator of four JavaScript application frameworks, including Jo, which is a lightweight solution for cross-​​​​platform mobile apps. In his spare time, Dave designs and writes games, makes music, and writes. Follow Dave on Twitter: @balmer Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

There’s an old expression, that there are only 2 hard problems in computing: naming, cache invalidation and off-​​by-​​one errors. Building offline web apps is all about those hard problems. There are some different ways of storing stuff - such as html5 caching, html5 storage, sqllite, and even native stores such as contacts and calendars - and we’ll sing their praises. But the really hard problems are knowing what to store, whether the stuff is still good or needs refreshing, how much to store, how to resolve conflicts between the client and server, how to integrate with data-​​specific stores, all in a bewildering cacophony of network and storage limited devices. We’ll spend the bulk of our time on these hard problems, which is probably more useful than api description and sample code. Dave Orchard is Mobile Architect at Salesforce​.com and located in Vancouver, Canada. This means being involved in many mobile platforms, architectures, tools, technologies and APIs. Prior to that, he was a co-​​founder of Ayogo Games and focused on iPhone and ruby/​merb/​mysql based casual social games. Back further in the mists of time, he was the Web standards lead for BEA Systems for 7 years, including being elected three times to 2 year terms on the W3C Technical Architecture Group chaired by Sir Tim Berners-​​Lee. Follow Dave on Twitter: @DaveO Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Dear app makers, I love the stuff you have been putting out recently. Supercool maps, guides, syncing and such make my day. There’s just one little thing. As a content strategist and writer, I’ve noticed that some of your instructions aren’t as clear as they could be. The experience is not as fulfilling as it might be. I know this might not be your favourite part of the process. In fact, they are probably the bits chucked in to get it out the door. And so I have created a session to help ease the pain. I have a framework for you to build on to make sure that your next app is as pithy as it is pretty and elegant to use as it is coded. I’ll even bring a whole virtual suitcase of apps with fantastic snippets of microcopy to inspire you. It’s a pretty simple concept and it’s a bunch of fun to work on, running alongside your app development. In one sentence: it’s about creating a fulfilling experience, one that puts you ahead of your competition, simply through the power of the written word. Relly Annett-​​Baker lives in a leafy market town with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she eats far too many cakes from Waitrose and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being content strategist and content writer for Headscape, she is employed as live-​​in domestic staff by two cats. She also writes articles and jabbers on about copy to anyone who will listen, creates scrapbooks, and continues to procrastinate over the draft for her book, a guide to creating web content for designers and developers, to be published in Spring 2011 by Five Simple Steps. She better finish this biography before her editor spots she isn’t writing her book again. Follow Relly on Twitter: @RellyAB Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

This keynote will focus on the unique potential offered to web developers - the ability to use the web platform to build compelling applications that reach across different devices, scenarios and environments. In discussing the approaches necessary to deliver great experiences across all these spaces, we will also uncover unique opportunities in a platform that reaches from mobile phones to the biggest display screen in your house. Chris Wilson is a Developer Advocate at Google Inc. He began working on web browsers in 1993 when he co-​​authored the original Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, the first mass-​​market WWW browser. After leaving NCSA in 1994 and spending a year working on the AIRMosaic web browser for SPRY, Inc., he joined Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team as a developer in 1995. Over the course of 15 years, Chris represented Microsoft in many standards working groups, in particular helping develop standards for Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, the Document Object Model and XSL through the W3C working groups. He also developed the first implementation of Cascading Style Sheets in Internet Explorer – the first, in fact, in any mass-​​market web browser. Beginning in 2001, he spent a few years working on the WPF project, but rejoined the IE team in 2004 to lead the IE Platform and Security team, then moved to work on the Javascript engine team in 2009. In 2010, Chris left Microsoft and joined Google’s Developer Relations team, and is currently working on the Google TV project. In his free time, he enjoys photography and hiking with his wife and daughter, and scuba diving in the cool waters of Puget Sound. Occasionally he remembers to share his thoughts on his blog. Follow Chris on Twitter: @cwilso Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

You’ve seen a lot of demos, but is HTML5 really ready for primetime? We made an HTML5-​​based pool game with the explicit goal of creating an experience that defies your expectations for what a browser can do. In this session we’ll take you through the challenges and triumphs of working with this new technology. For the experienced HTML5 dev, we’ll share tips and tricks. For the rest of us, it will be a great primer on the exciting potential that HTML5 brings to the web. Robby Ingebretsen is a user experience designer and developer with a singular purpose: making great ideas real. As the founder of Pixel Lab, a user experience consultancy that specializes in Silverlight, HTML5 and mobile technologies, he helps clients make cool stuff - the kind that needs the unique full-​​bodied blend of a little design love and a little engineering kung-​​fu. Follow Robby on Twitter: @ingebretsen Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Most user experience research takes place sitting behind a computer. And yet these days, most networked experiences are happening on mobile devices. Some common user experience research methods work well in a mobile environment - others don’t. In this talk, Juliette Melton will guide you through how to use some great existing research methods in a mobile context, how to incorporate some new (and fun!) methods into your arsenal, and propose next generation tools and services to make mobile user experience research even better. Juliette has ten years of experience building, managing, and researching digital environments and is a human factors researcher based at IDEO in San Francisco. She’s deeply interested in the intersections between digital culture, learning, and communication. Her work has spanned a broad range of industries including social media, casual gaming, education administration, electronic publishing, corporate banking, computer hardware, and public health. Community education - through workshops, lectures, and writing - is an important part of her work. Remote user experience methods, agile project management, and research program planning are frequent topics. Juliette holds an MEd from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on developing models for innovative networked learning applications. She also has a BA in Comparative Literature from Haverford College. Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

The average size of an adult human’s finger pad is 10-​​14mm. The average size of a cursor or stylus tip is 1-​​2mm. That fact alone means that designing native touchscreen apps is an entirely different thing than designing web, desktop, or even traditional mobile apps. This talk outlines the most important concepts, guidelines, and practices to keep in mind when designing with fingers and hands in mind. We’ll cover interaction zones (where it’s easiest for fingers to reach), touch targets (size and distance apart), kinesiology (how fingers can bend, move, and stretch), and signaling (how users can become aware of gestures). Dan Saffer is an interaction designer and the author of two books: Designing Gestural Interfaces and Designing for Interaction. He is the co-​​founder and one of the principals at Kicker Studio, a design consultancy in San Francisco that does "interaction-​​infused" product design. Since 1995, Dan has designed devices, software, websites, and services that are currently used by millions every day. He speaks at conferences and teaches workshops on interaction design all over the world. He and his products have been in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Wired, and his design innovations have received several patents. Follow Dan on Twitter: @odannyboy Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

In the absence of a "Widgets for Dummies" book being available at your local bookstore, this presentation will try to bring you up-​​to-​​speed with what you need to know to start developing widgets. Split into two parts, we’ll cover the theory behind widgets: * seriously, yet another platform to code for?! - vendor and manufacturer support for widgets & compatible development frameworks * what widgets are good for - save your users (and yourself) time, money and frustration * what widgets are not-​​so-​​good for - they’re not a silver bullet! and widgets in practice: * widgets and device compatibility - the good news is also potential bad news * screen sizes - resizing and its headaches * widget distribution and making money - everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we? You’ll get most out of this talk if you: * have heard of widgets but don’t know how to use them * are wondering whether widgets could solve a particular problem you have. (i.e. no specific browser) * have tried making widgets but got stuck and gave up Daniel is the Web Evangelist for Opera’s Japan office based in Tokyo. His previous work experience includes project management, IT training, web development, software development and system administration in both Japan and the UK, his home country. After studying Japanese and Chinese at university, he grew more and more interested in the flourishing field of IT and the web, learning as much as he could by playing and experimenting with internet-​​related technologies. His current work promoting web standards and cross-​​device web development at Opera fits in perfectly with his ideology of openness and equality across linguistic, social and socio-​​economic borders. Follow Daniel on Twitter: @ourmaninjapan Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

The web platform has already taken a center role in our desktop and mobile computing lives. The next space for the web platform to take over is the biggest screen in your house - the TV in your living room. However, designing for television has its own set of demands, different than designing for desktop and mobile implementations. This talk outlines the most important best practices to keep in mind when designing web applications for TV. We’ll cover issues like directional pad navigation, user interface design for TV, color issues, and zooming, as well as discussing some unique opportunities for TV applications. Daniels is a Developer Programs Engineer who’s had the pleasure of working with several developer communities since he joined the team in 2006. After starting with iGoogle gadgets, he worked closely with advertisers and agencies via Gadget Ads, then onto Geo APIs focusing on V2 to V3 migration, and now Google TV. He’s not afraid to publicly confess his love for JavaScript and recognizes its profound ability to make the web more interactive. With a growing love for HTML5 technology, sky’s the limit. On his off time, he enjoys cultivating authentic relationships while always pursuing a greater sense of self and awareness. Follow Daniels on Twitter: @dannon81 Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

While location-​​based mobile apps are becoming increasingly popular, they are still relatively new. Special considerations need to be made for battery life and handling large data sets of geolocated data. The good news is there are many services and technologies you can use to assist you in building mobile location-​​based apps. In this session, Aaron Parecki, co-​​founder of Geoloqi​.com, shows you services you can leverage to do things like nearby business lookups, location-​​based triggers, nearest intersection queries, and more. Aaron also covers the location services available on the various mobile platforms as well as in HTML 5, and shares some insights on how to deal with battery life. The session concludes with some real-​​world use cases for real-​​time location such as turning on and off your lights in your house or notifying your boss if you’ll be late to work. Aaron Parecki is a Portland-​​based iPhone and PHP developer interested in solving practical problems with technology. In his free time, he enjoys geolocation, linguistics, and building home automation systems and IRC bots with a sense of humor. For the past 2½ years, he has been tracking and visualizing his location every 6 seconds. He created Geoloqi​.com with Amber Case in an effort to help people connect in the real world. He has 11 years experience in web app development, database design, and server administration. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronpk Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Being a front-​​end designer used to mean pixel hacking and endless rounds of pain while trying to make sites and applications "look the same in each browser". Thankfully, we now live in more interesting times. But as we strive to make our web apps a pleasure to use, the vast array of tools and techniques available to us present their own set of challenges. In this session you will learn to ask the right questions to guide your choice of tools and the design. Find out how to creatively use new features of CSS3 (gradients, multiple backgrounds, generated content, and many more) to give life to your design ideas, make them adaptable and maintainable, and provide the best experience possible on an array of platforms. Finally, you’ll hear how to create a library of simple and ready-​​to-​​use design patterns, that you can incorporate into your workflow to bring your designs to life much faster. Divya Manian is a Web Designer in Seattle. She made the jump from developing device drivers for Motorola phones to designing websites and has not looked back since. She takes her duties as an Open Web vigilante seriously which has resulted in collaborative projects such as HTML5 Readiness and HTML5 Boilerplate. Speaker Photo: © Mohini Patel Glanz. Follow Divya on Twitter: @nimbuin Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

The Canvas tag has been around for a while, and HTML5 has given it more visibility. It’s now finding its way into most mobile browsers, and even a majority of desktop browsers. This talk will give a solid overview of what the canvas tag is, what it can do, and how it compares with other technologies like SVG and Flash. Several practical code examples will show how you can use it along with CSS3 and other HTML5 goodies to make your web apps more featured, efficient and downright cool. As a Senior Software Engineer with Palm Developer Relations, Dave is a JavaScript guru currently focused on mobile app development. He is the creator of four JavaScript application frameworks, including Jo HTML5 Mobile App Framework, which is a lightweight solution for cross-​​platform mobile apps. In his spare time, Dave designs and writes games, makes music, and writes. Follow Dave on Twitter: @balmer Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

We’ve heard it all before: prototype, prototype, prototype. It’s a standard step in almost any design process - but often the first step skipped in time and budget constrained projects. While prototyping is considered a standard step in any UX design process, it is an *essential* part of the mobile UX process. This talk will outline why prototyping is essential to part of the mobile UX process and how prolific prototyping is a necessary step for designers keen to grow the ruthless editing skills necessary to craft successful mobile experiences. This talk will also cover common and uncommon mobile prototyping tools, methods and techniques that you can apply to your project work. Rachel Hinman is a researcher, designer and a recognized thought leader in the mobile user experience field. Currently, Rachel is a Senior Research Scientist at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. There she focuses on the research and design of emergent and experimental mobile interfaces and mobile experiences for emerging markets. Prior to joining Nokia, Rachel was an experience design director at Adaptive Path, and a mobile researcher and strategist for Yahoo’s mobile group. Rachel writes and speaks frequently on the topic of mobile research and design. She is the creative force behind the 90 Mobiles in 90 Days Project and her perspectives on mobile user experience has been featured in Interactions Magazine, BusinessWeek and Wired. She is currently writing a book entitled, "The Mobile Frontier: A Guide for Designing Mobile Experiences" with Rosenfeld Media. Expected publication is late 2011. Follow Rachel on Twitter: @Hinman Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

As browsers explode with new capabilities and migrate onto devices users can be left wondering, "what’s taking so long?" Learn how HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the web itself conspire against a fast-​​running application and simple tips to create a snappy interface that delight users instead of frustrating them. Nicholas C. Zakas is principal front-​​end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage, a contributor to YUI, and an author. Nicholas has written Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, Professional Ajax, and High Performance JavaScript. He has also contributed a chapter to Steve Souders’ Even Faster Web Sites. Nicholas posts regularly at his blog as well as on YUI Blog. Follow Nicholas on Twitter: @slicknet Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

A new generation of touch devices have proven to be exciting playgrounds for app designers. And with every new product we create, we have the opportunity to offer the most clear and efficient experience for our users. Recent UI trends often lean to realistic, faithful representations of analog controls and features. These designs can offer advantages, but also come with their own set of hazards. In this session Aaron will lead you on a tour of current trends and practices, examining the strengths and drawbacks that realism brings. We’ll talk about things like mental models, innovation and usability as they relate to lifelike UI. Finally, Aaron will share some pragmatic guidelines to keep in mind as you build the next wave of mobile and touch apps. A mixed breed designer/​developer, Aaron’s career is built upon a unique blend of creative and technical sensibilities. He began twelve years ago leading interactive initiatives for Colorado’s top design agencies, delivering successful projects for a range of clients including HP, Spyder Active Sports and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In 2004 he joined ESPN New Media where he provided instrumental leadership in an Art Director role. At ESPN he guided best practices, developed core UI components and designed pioneering real time game and scoring applications. Aaron currently serves as Creative Director for Fanzter, a lean and profitable New England based startup. His work has appeared on Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Ajax Rain and was awarded at the 27th annual Sports Emmys. Aaron’s academic background spans three fields of study at three different universities, settling into a B.S. in Scientific and Technical Communication from Michigan Tech. His offline hobbies involve learning about social psychology and human behavior, photography, and a quest to find the perfect iPod earphones. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aweyenberg Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

No one who advocates for the mobile web wants to admit it, but it is true. Native is easier. It’s easier to sell to stakeholders. Easier to monetize. And most importantly, easier to implement. Argue about programming languages, memory management and reach all you want. There is one undeniable disadvantage that the mobile web faces that native apps don’t - over a decade of legacy code, cruft and entrenched organizational politics. But the web is essential. Even companies whose businesses are centered on native apps need web pages to sell those apps. We can demonstrate time and again that a web-​​based approach is a smart investment. So how do we sell mobile web projects? How do we work with the systems we currently have to build compelling mobile web experiences? And most importantly, how should we be changing our web infrastructure, tools and workflow for the coming zombie apocalypse of devices. Jason Grigsby was one of the project leads on the Obama ’08 iPhone Application and helped design the user interface for the Wall Street Journal’s Blackberry application. Jason is a co-​​founder of Cloud Four, a small start-​​up focused on mobile web development. He founded and organizes Mobile Portland. Jason is currently co-​​authoring Head First Mobile Web for O’Reilly Publishing. The book will be available this winter. Follow Jason on Twitter: @grigs Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).