If you’ve been to one of our conferences, you would have seen many presentations put together using Keynote, the presentation software for Mac OS X by Apple. Now a small team have put together what is effectively a Keynote clone, but done entirely on the web – all HTML, Javascript and CSS. It’s not quite […]
Marketing and advertising seem to be almost at odds with the idea of a service – most of us associate advertising with intrusive interruptions to things we’d rather be doing – like reading a web site, watching TV, listening to music, or just walking down the street. On the web though, the economics of “free” […]
Via Business Week’s excellent innovation blog, by Bruce Nussbaum, we came across the World Economic Forum’s latest “Networked Readiness” report, the aim of which is to rank nations by “measuring economies’capacity to fully leverage ICT for increased competitiveness and development”. Australia ranks a healthy 14th, ahead of Austria, Germany, Japan, France and New Zealand, but […]
CSS guru, and speaker at Web Directions South this year, Jina Bolton has an article published in this edition of the venerable A List Apart – Writing an Interface Style Guide From the article Unfortunately, it’s also common that beautiful interfaces don’t stay beautiful. An interface’s design disintegration can be frustrating to deal with, especially […]
During his recent visit to Australia for Web Directions Government, Jose Alonso made reference to the upcoming vote on the World Wide Web Consortium’s proposed eGovernment initiative. Today it was announced that thw W3C will indeed charter an eGovernment Activity, open to public participation. The group will identify best practices and guidelines in this area, […]
After weeks of 530am starts with my daughter last year, and living where the local cafes don’t open ’til 800am, I couldn’t face another 3 hour stint before my first coffee, and so took myself off to the nearest purveyor of fine espresso makers, and as luck would have it, picked up a Saeco machine […]
Looks like using images as link anchors is patented. This madness has got to end sometime soon no?
Some years ago I had the privilege to see Sir Tim Berners-lee speak at WWW2005 in Japan. One of the things which stayed with me was his strong emphasis on the word “user” in the term “user agent”. In particular he made mention of pop up ads, and how these violated the intrinsic contract of […]
After a few twitter induced hiccups, we’ve both launched Web Directions South, and managed to reboot the server which didn’t seem to like a rather large spike in traffic after word got out about the launch on Twitter this am. There’s a lot we could say about the lineup – the return of some crowd […]
ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, has published a detail report entitled “Top Six Trends in Communications and Media Technologies, Applications and Services—Possible Implications“. Section 5, “Web-based services and the emerging ‘social web’” focusses on where these technologies might be headed. What’s interesting is that their predictions for the next 5 years roughly approximate […]
Melbourne Keynote speaker Andy Budd did an in-depth interview with Matt Magain at SitePoint while down south, and it’s now published. Quite an epic it is too, and well worth a read.
Thanks to all who helped make both Web Directions UX and Web Directions Government fantastic successes. The turnouts were wonderful, presentations world class, and the vibe at both conferences enthusiastic and excited. Based on the success of both these events, I’m sure we’ll be seeing them return. You’ll find slideshows from a number of the […]
I took this photo late last year. I can’t recall exactly which CD it was, or whether it was software or music. I have a feeling it might have been a game for the Wii? You can tell pretty clearly that the design doesn’t work. So, how do they respond? By blaming the user for […]
Today I’ve had need not once but twice to use complex form based interfaces from two enormous multinational companies. Each was a spectacularly frustrating experience, and goes to show just how far we are from designing decent web experiences much of the time. In order to salvage at least some value from these experiences, and […]
Cameron Adams, known worldwide as “the man in blue“, has done it again. His latest masterpiece is cubescape, a javascript tour de force, showing just how rich and interactive javascript based applications can be. It’s also fun to play with. So go and marvel at what you can do in your browser today with standards […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
