@media 2006 - Day Two

A perfect London summer morning for the second day of @media 2006 meant I could stroll to the venue and I arrived just in time for Dan Cederholm’s insightful presentation, Bulletproof Web Design. Not only does Dan have heaps of experience and a stunning portfolio of work, he has a seemingly endless attention to detail. Inspiring stuff which I’ve definitely taken to heart. I’m still not sure what DigDug is though :-)

Next up was Javascript Libraries: Friend or Foe? with Cameron Adams, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge, Dan Webb, and Simon Willison. As primarily a software developer, I found this rather frustrating. The entire session was a discussion of whether Javascript libraries were useful or not, but I found the arguments on both side lacking in rationale: “I don’t like libraries, I like to cut & paste the code I need”, for example. There was a lot of focus on the Dojo Toolkit but I didn’t really take much away from this.

Enter Cameron Moll presenting Mobile Web Design.

This was of an excellent presentation (and Cameron wins the ‘Slide Design’ award hands down), introducing the issues surrounding designing for mobile devices, discussing how such designs should be approached (think: “What is contextually relevant?”) and introduced me to a worrying number of new acronyms and buzzwords (Flash Lite, LBS, RFID, XHTML-MP, .mobi). There’s no escaping the fact that mobiles are going to be an increasingly large target market for web designers and this was a perfect introduction.

Lack of time management skills (and talking to Cameron) meant I missed the first part of CSS Project Management with Rachel Andrew, Roger Johansson and Dave Shea, but I took a lot out of what I saw. It was a panel discussion of different techniques and tools for managing CSS projects and it was interesting to hear people’s differing approaches. When the topic of development environments was raised, I didn’t get a chance to plug Karlis Blumental’s astonishingly good WeBuilder product, so there’s a quick plug. If only it were available on the Mac. Gah!

The last presentation was the Modfather himself, Andy Clarke, who was looking seriously sharp:

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design was great, taking Andy’s scrapbook inspirations and applying them to the web, questioning and challenging designers to take the initiative and push CSS to the limit. In essence, forgot trying to make sites look identical in IE 4, IE5 and Safari 1 and instead, make them look awesome in Firefox and Safari 2 and leave them to just work in older browsers. This is just so right that I’m sure this will be the next web design movement. Look out for the book (”Transcending CSS”) in the autumn.

To wrap up, Molly Holzschlag, Jon Hicks, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik held a “hot topics” panel discussion about AJAX, the World Cup, cheese and the Next Big Thing (Microformats - you heard it here last). Here’s the panel, minus Tantek (sorry dude):

You can probably tell I had a great time. I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years and this was, without question, the best I’ve been to. Not only were the presentations superb, but the atmosphere was friendly and the speakers wanted to talk to people over coffee. If they weren’t speaking, they would have been there anyway! And that pretty much says it all.

Posted by Olly on June 16, 2006 at 10:22 pm in @media, atmedia, css, news, web
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