In 2006, Maxine and I started a prize for excellence in Australian Web design in honour of Nigel McFarlane, Australian web and open source pioneer. Unlike many awards, it’s not about popularity, it’s about excellence – as assessed by a Jury of genuine experts in the fields of design, coding, accessibility and user experience. It’s […]
Get yourself along to John Allsopp and Pasquale D’Silva’s workshop at Web Directions South: Animating Your User Experiences. A brief history on Animation of the Web If you’ve been developing for, or even just using the web for more than about 15 years, you’ll likely remember a time when animated effects were the bomb. Animated […]
Hard perhaps to believe, but the world wide web began without an image element. That’s right, there was no way to include images as part of the content of a web page before Mosaic implemented them (here’s Marc Andreesen proposing the img element at the beginning of 1993). The img element ushered in the age […]
Getting your head around CSS3 radial gradients We recently took a detailed look at linear gradients in CSS3. If you’ve not read that, you might like to spend a few minutes doing so, as the concepts are very similar, and I don’t spend quite as much time in this article on the fundamentals of gradients […]
Taking your web sites and apps offline with the HTML5 appcache There’s a general (and understandable) belief by even many developers that web sites and web applications can only be used when the browser has a web connection. Indeed, this is routinely cited as one of the real advantages of “native” apps over web apps. […]
It’s been a while since we posted anything particularly technical to the Web Directions blog, but that’s something we plan on changing. Here’s the first in a series of technical articles on CSS3 features (along with tools to help you lean and use them). We’re starting with linear gradients. We’ll take a look at where […]
I’d not heard of Jack Draws anything, a wonderful initiative by the 6 year old Jack Henderson who will draw whatever you want, for a donation that goes to the Sick Kids Foundation. So far he’s raised £20,000! Bruce Lawson, one of the great presenters at @media asked Jack to draw a picture of big […]
What: Random Hacks of Kindness Where: Swinburne University of Technology, Advanced Technologies Centre When: Sat June 4 and Sun June 5 2011 Who: Designers, developers, IxD and UX experts, students and professionals How Much: Free! But please RSVP You’ve got the skills, and they pay the bills. But, wouldn’t it be great to put those […]
Toda’s closing keynote session by Jason Grigsby will be streamed live, courtesy of our excellent friends at pinch/zoom. So pop by at 4pm Pacific Time (midnight GMT, 9am Australian east coast, 8am Tokyo) for what will be a fantastic session.
If you’ve missed the twitter and other announcements, tomorrow, Web Directions is running an event with the NSW State Library, Mashup the Mitchell, as part of the month-long LibraryHack event run by the state libraries, plus Australian and NZ National Libraries. Now, in this always on world, Libraries don’t always have the most up to […]
We’ve just published the first “State of (Mobile) Web Development” Report, analysing the results of our recent survey of over 1,300 developers. In previous years, we’ve published a single report covering the entire survey, but this year, with the rise in interest in HTML5 and mobile development, we’re also publishing this more focussed report. We’ll […]
We’ve just launched our third State of Web Development Survey, where we ask web practitioners, designers and developers, what technologies and practices they currently use. This year, the survey has undergone quite an overhaul, with an additonal focus on HTML5 and application development, alongside our focus on web page and site design and development. If […]
On Saturday, we had the privilege of running apps4nsw, for the DSTA, the NSW Department of Services, Technology and Administration, at the Powerhouse Museum. Over 150 developers, designers and others turned up from 8am for 12 hours of brainstorming, app building, presentations, and prizes. More than 40 projects were entered for judging in 5 categories, […]
For years now, the web has been evolving from a web of pages and documents, to being more application oriented. We’ve long seen “webapps” of the likes of Flickr, and Gmail, but with HTML5, particularly on iOS, Android, webOS, and other emerging platforms we are seeing open web technologies becoming not just a legitimate, but […]
Back in late 2009, we were privileged to be asked by the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce to run an event encouraging developers, designers and others to build great applications with open government data. The success (and downright plain fun of GovHack) got us here at Web Directions wondering how we could run more such events […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
