devolute.net

I’m a big fan of Twitter. Through it I have acquired design advice, job interviews and technical help. More importantly, it also allows me to follow the adventures of Princess Diana (aka the Queen of ‘Arrrrrts) as she enjoys her time in Heaven, amongst all the other celebrities. Just like when she was with us on earth, she is a constant source of inspiration. Her Twitter account is perfect if, like me, you have too much self respect to buy the Daily Express and read about her there. She also sent me this rather fetching badge. As it came through my door this morning i ran to the door, only to see a white Fiat Uno race away down my street. I shall wear it proudly, always.

Follow DianaInHeaven on Twitter. We miss you, Ma’am.

Okay, this is a bit late (There has already been a Speak the Web: Liverpool event), but here are some brief thoughts from last Thursdays Speak the Web conference in Leeds.

Corn on the cob?

Stuart Smith started with a brief (and quite amusing) history of the mobile web. He made the point that it’s not just iPhone users that we should build mobile websites for and that the typical mobile user was probably using a much less capable Nokia S40-based phone. He’s right of course, but he ignored the fact that iPhone users typically use the web on their mobiles much more than anyone else, but maybe that’s because the web often sucks so badly on the standard Nokia S40/60 browser? Still, he noted that countries like Uganda had quite advanced 4G networks so we, as developers, should be mindful of opportunities in places we otherwise are not mindful of. He also showed a slide of a corn-on-the-cob vibrator. Despite the other guys’ immaculately presented slides, this won the title of classiest slide of the night.

Opera was represented by Chris Mills. His talk had largely the same content as Bruce Lawson’s in Sheffield (so I won’t go into detail again). The HTML5 slides from Sheffield have been uploaded, by the way. He presented it in a similarly energetic way though, so I wasn’t bored hearing it again! I also learned that lots of people in Russia use Opera, but not many people who speak about Opera!

I’ve read a great deal by Andy Clark, on his blog, on Twitter and elsewhere on the web. He often goes under the name Malarkey so I shall refer to him as such. His talk can be summed up, I think, thus: Design for the clients you want and build for the web browser you want. I think this was what he meant by Hard Boiled web design. The concept of progressive enrichment (as opposed to enhancement), I think has its benefits. After all, even the appearance of the pages he showed us on tired old IE looked pretty nice.

I laughed when he showed us the IE6 stylesheet he’s been using for years. So sparse. I understand the need to bully IE users onto a more advanced browser, for the good of the web. I also feel no love for Microsoft. However, this approach just seems vindictive. The bulk of IE6 users are those poor souls working in government agencies and councils, the NHS and others who have no control over what browser they use. To give them such a poor online experience seems unnecessarily cruel. If they chose to use IE6 themselves, I’d say stuff ‘em, but no one chooses to use IE6 these days. Of course Malarkey’s talk was a stark contrast to the boys from Cahoona who spoke in Sheffield: “Just give the client what he wants, regardless of whether it’s the best solution” (I’m paraphrasing). I wish them both well, but I think I’d rather work as Malarkey does. If I was in a position to do so of course!

All in all, another awesome conference. I think the audience was a bit more chatty and asked more questions than in Sheffield. Was this because Leeds has a more excitable bunch of design-types? Maybe, but I think it had more to do with how well the speakers got on. They ripped the piss out of each other in such a good-hearted way that I think it relaxed everyone. Malarkey even dropped a Hicks-approved oooOOOOh! bomb. First time I’ve seen it used ‘in anger’. I’d like to note that at both events there were some pretty friendly folk. It was a weird novelty for me that the first two people I said hello to in Leeds both noted that they had read my blog post about Speak the Web: Sheffield! Thanks once again to the guys who arranged all this.

Cahoona tell it like it is

Sheffield had its very own web conference in the form of Speak the Web and I had to go, due to the scarcity of such things in this town. Frustrating considering how many creative agencies there are round here. We’ve had TEDx North, which was great, but what I really wanted was something tailored for hungry designers and developers. It was held at the Showroom Cinema in town and the creators said that they wanted something akin to the atmosphere of a gig. Hence the £20 entrance fee. Although the only gig I’ve been to that cost more than 20 quid was Radiohead. But they didn’t give you a free drink.

Two chaps from Cahoona told us how they set up their agency, so of course there were the usual tales about living off pot noodles and worrying about the cash-flow. Their scotch-egg (sorry, Manchester-egg) heavy presentation was pretty well done and amusing. They had one legendary slide: “Make it shitter”. I think it was a reference to the problem that is often faced due to client-meddling. I guess their success shows that they deal with this meddling well, by caving into the request of the client, no matter how awful. I’m not 100% sure that’s how I’d run a web agency, but I understand their reasoning and hey… I’m probably never going to run a web agency. I dig their work though, especially their company website.

This slide highlights the complexity of adding video to a webpage at the moment, due to nasty 'legacy' browsers

Bruce Lawson was the man from Opera. I’ve tried to use Opera on the Desktop and I always go back to Firefox (or Chrome), but he wasn’t here to pimp Opera. He was here to pimp HTML5, which Opera (especially Opera 10.5) supports pretty well. I’ve read quite a bit about HTML5 (including a lot at html5doctor, where Bruce writes) and the whole thing is quite exciting, but Bruce made it sound more realistic than I had previously imagined it was. My attitude has been that it is ‘for the future’, but now my attitude is that HTML5 is for now. The usual HTML5 video tricks were demonstrated, along with some stuff I didn’t know about, such as a totally different way that one can structure headings (Two H1s on a page? You have blown my mind!). Bruce wasn’t some crazy futurist though and he told us how, for example, we could get SVG-based graphics working in IE using VML. He didn’t go into too much detail (it wasn’t the time or the place for that) but he caused plenty of little sparks to fire in my brain.

Finally it was the turn of Brendan Dawes from magneticNorth. He was a great contrast to Bruce: all about the “Cushions”, the flash, fluff and visual niceties that make a website a website, rather than just a flat image. The best example he showed us of this, I think, was the shopping cart that smiled as you added products to it. A simple effect, but one that I can imagine makes a user happy. We were all children once and to bring that playful aspect into web design has got to have benefits. Although he may have sounded at odds with Bruce, the reality is that due to HTML5, CSS3 and some powerful js libraries, it is now possible for a good developer to make pages that are full of ‘Cushions’ but which are accessible and thus keep Bruce (and disabled people) happy. I hope they talked to each other after the event.

Brendan also pointed out that there weren’t many girls at this event and that it was a bit like a “gay club”. Firstly, a load of dudes in one place doesn’t constitute a gay club. If it did, then the Tory front-benches would be, well… less said about that the better. Secondly, we’re all well aware of the lack of women in technology. It needs sorting, but I think sometimes joking about the lack of women in tech isn’t terribly helpful.

So, in summary: this event was brilliant and all the speakers were interesting. I’m inclined more now to go to one of the local GeekUp events, which I think the people who arranged this conference are also involved with. To use the hosts analogy of a gig: it wasn’t as good as Radiohead, but it was a lot more interesting than that time I saw a side project by one of the guys out of Busted. Shudder.

The Speak the Web peeps have put up a better round-up on their page. I’m off to the event they’re running in Leeds tonight.

There were already plenty of reasons to get an Android device. Now there is another reason. A big reason. There has been an official announcement regarding the release of Google Maps Navigation. This provides turn by turn navigation, traffic data and voice commands, basically all the stuff you’d expect of a high-end in-car GPS system. It irradiates the major downside of using Google Maps previously on mobile devices: it caches map data of the route you’re going to take. The big advantages are: It’s free. It utilities Street View, which is potentially very helpful and a service that no one else can realistically provide. Using Google Maps means it knows what ‘Maps knows. That is; everything. Local businesses, attractions and landmarks should all be easier to locate. It also has voice commands, which is something Google has done very well before and likewise, I think their UI is usually on pretty good form.

It’s only going to be available in the US initially, but the same goes for many of these big ‘Map-based projects.

This is one in the eye for Apple and friends, whose app store is currently full of £40+ turn-by-turn navigation apps. It’s bad news for GPS system makers as well, who rely on their proprietary software to shift their hardware. If you are particularly cruel, you can watch the stock of Garmin and Tom Tom fall on Google Finance or head to Engadget for further (typically excitable) coverage and videos.

Okay, so I’m a bit cheeky. I went to two TEDx Norths. I went to the one in Sheffield, where I live. Then when I saw they had some interesting speakers, I got some tickets for TEDx Manchester as well. The two were both interesting events and have been summed up better elsewhere on other blogs, so here I will make just a couple of brief points.

I preferred the Sheffield TEDx. Why? Because although the speakers sounded like they’d be less interesting on paper, they were actually more interesting. Manchester gave us talks from people with big credentials. People from all across the BBC: Radio, Childrens, the head of research & development at BBC Future Media & Technology. There were people from the Guardian and from Nokia. These guys all gave interesting talks, but they were so wide in scope. In Sheffield the deal from the speakers was thus: “I’ve made something / am involved in something. Maybe not a lot of people find it that interesting, but I’m really into it and I want to share my passion with you”. In Manchester it was more, “Facebook! Twitter! Web 2.0! Social media! Cliche!” and I got a little lost in all the buzz words. Twitter and Facebook were mentioned so frequently, I think we could have engineered a drinking game out of it. I didn’t learn anything new about either of them, unfortunately. It didn’t help that each speaker had 20mins each, which blatantly wasn’t enough for most of them. Like in Sheffield, we were played old TED talks on video. If I wanted to watch them, I would do in my own time (as I often do) on Miro, or their YouTube channel. This should have been scrapped to give the speakers more time! (Disclaimer; I think Lost is the most self-congratulatory peace of crap JJ Abrahams, nay, anyone has ever done, so his talk was especially lost on me)

For me, the one guy who stood out was Phil Griffin. He talked about Manchester and its architecture. He told us about the tower blocks that are being torn down and the old pubs he knows that are lying dormant. This is obviously something that he cared about deeply (he even showed us pictures of the area where he once got married). This, more focused talk, was simply superb. I have an interest in architecture sure, but I’m a web developer with a much keener interest in the web. But the one man who didn’t mention the web (let alone any web2.0 cliche’s) once during his talk was easily the most fascinating speaker. He also used the large screen to display photography, rather than a dry list of bullet points (“*facebook *twitter *web2.0″).

Maybe in the future TEDx North could, and I don’t believe I’m saying this, be a little less web-orientated next time? Some pictures are available on my flickr stream.

You’ve probably heard of the TED talks. They’ve spread in part due to their excellent internet strategy: a powerful website, a strong presence on YouTube, software like Miro and the like. TEDx is a series of talks operating in the UK under license, I believe. They don’t quite pull in the Bill Gates and Seth Godins’ of the main TED talks but, as I found out last week, they present some pretty interesting folks.

TEDx came to Sheffield so my colleague and I spent the whole day at Electric Works and yes, we had a go on the slide. The range of talks kept things interesting. It started off quite business-orientated and the highlight in the morning was definitely Mike Southon of the Financial Times. He gave an obviously very finely tuned presentation that likened business success to the path the Beatles took. It was pretty ‘fluffy’ stuff, but I’m no business-head so that was probably fortunate. As the day progressed, the talks got a bit more creative-y. Highlights for me were Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker it! bigging up the Arduino open-source hardware project and Andy Huntington with his little magic noise boxes (my name for them, not his). I wanted my own.

Andy Huntington at TEDx Sheffield

By the afternoon, the suits had all disappeared and the crowd was a little more geeky (I mean that in a loving way, obviously). That’s understandable, considering the breadth of topics. TEDx Sheffield was a day that did inspire, the only bad thing I thought was that they played us videos of previous international TED talks. I could have stayed at home to watch those, guys. I took some (not especially great) pictures that you can view on my flickr stream.

Google Street View is a pretty amazing addition to Maps now we’ve got it in the UK. I’ve seen my nans house, my office and my old car but now I’m bored. I need someone to find the best bits for me. Only a few cities are covered so far, but fortunately for me that includes Sheffield. I’m finding from blogs and twitter that people that understand the technology don’t care about the intrusion, because it’s just so damn cool.

Friend of Catch21, Conrad, created this flickr group to highlight the best of Street View UK . I’ve displayed a highlight here *proudly plays national anthem*

Visit the Google Street View flickr group.

Twitter bird and fail whale

This brilliant illustrator has unleashed another ‘State of the web’ report. I love his vectors and his take on what matters on the web. I still think we cat-fans still prefer his seminal piece: How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you, though.

The State of the Web Winter 2009

3 inches. Not great, but even more worrying is that, according to the ‘Newest Twicks’ column, lots of girls are a lot bigger than I am. Never have I felt like less of a man. Honest.

Find yours at twicksize.com

It seems rampant right now. Lots of speak about of account hacking and all sorts of nastyness. Perhaps this is why twitter needs a proper API key system? Flickr has one and that’s usually pretty safe. People seem perfectly happy just to give away their twitter username and password to any site or firefox plug-in (some of these are almost adware) asking for it! My advice is don’t! As with all great ‘web2.0′ *spit* apps, Twitters strength lies in its expandability and openness, but I think more work needs doing to get a secure, working, framework in place.

Still, at least there is a comedy upside (thanks to a thousand twitterers for re-tweeting this).

Obviously I’ve missed the boat a bit on this one but if anyone wants to follow me on twitter, here I am: twitter.com/devolute. I’m going to be looking at ways to intergrate it with my WordPress install. I’ve just started but have had no problems with downtime and slowness that used to be blogged about at length a bit ago. I’m already finding it a useful tool but then you already knew that, right?

I’d never knock Google search. It just gets the job done. But check out Kosmix if you want more detailed results without having to click round. It’s a search service mash-up, kinda. More a ‘search organiser’. Ugh, what horrible web2.0 terms! Wait; let me explain:

When you search for something in Google you can then go through to what it feels is the most relevant page. If you search for something with Kosmix, it will show you everything it knows about the subject you searched for. It does this by bringing whatever it feels is relevant. So, if I search for Alec Baldwin, for example (hey; the new series of 30 rock has started and I’m excited!) it will bring in a bio from who2, pics from yahoo image search, interviews from CNN, clips from YouTube, books from Amazon and what people are saying on Friendfeed.

All this is presented on one pretty big, well formatted page. It will also bring up related items (so in this example, Tina Fey and ’30 Rock’ and his previous films). It’s great for searching for details on musicians as well, as it’ll bring in last.fm details and also for quickly getting up to date on politicians of interest (where it brings in polling data and Salon.com articles).

So is this a Google killer like some people (foolishly) claimed that cuil was? Nah. But it’s a great alternative for those who don’t like to visit 10 sites to quickly get a good picture of a person or subject.

Give Kosmix a try

I am a redditor and have been for some time. Yes IM buddies; that’s where that interesting link came from. When reddit decided to open up their code to the open-source community we all knew that some interesting stuff would pop-up. One of the UK’s rather more respectable rags; the Independent has decided to utilise the capabilities of reddit to rank its own news stories. It’s great to see a big old paper embrace an open-source system like this, but it’d be better if the Indie’s comments and those upon it’s reddit pages were syncronised. Small steps tho, ‘eh.

There is an announcement on the reddit blog and the new Independant reddit is now live, albeit not as busy as it could be.

usernamecheck.com is probably a good place to go when you first start out with a handle, it’s too late for me and ‘devolute’ now! What this little web-tool does is it scans all the popular web2.0 sites to see if your handle of choice is in use on their service or not. I think it serves a dual purpose of not only checking to see if your nick was a wise choice or not, but also it serves to reminds you where you may have previously registered accounts and forgotten about them.

Visit usernamecheck.com now to check if you have any impersonators!

via swissmiss