During my session we’ll look at where the future of HTML lies, including new structural elements. You’ll also grasp an introduction to associated technologies that have come into popularity with the steam of HTML5: SVG, Web Sockets, Web Workers, Geo-location and making applications useful offline.
In this presentation Grant Young will examine how innovative organisations are using social technologies and design methods to create multi-dimensional value — both for the organisational and community — and will explore the themes that underpin the examples with a view to applying them in your context.
This session will take you through building a location-based mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Including cross-platform techniques for figuring out where your users are, and providing graceful fallbacks options for devices that don’t have geolocation support (or users that don’t want to tell you exactly). You’ll learn about geocoding to a physical address (and the other way around) and look at how to build a mobile-friendly map with local points of interest.
Web typography has in the past two years seen a resurgence in interest and many would agree only rightly so, with most of the content on the web still textual. However the range of technical options available for setting type on the web is quite broad—not to mention the range of stylistic choices available—and often confusing. This session aims to demystify the current techniques available to set type on the web by comparing and contrasting the various options at hand while offering a set of good defaults and safe advice for not only making it accessible but also pleasurable to read.
Considering how many businesses depend upon the web for their income, it’s shocking how poorly designed most shops are. Not only aesthetically, but also as far as ease of use, retail psychology and user experience are concerned. How can we design better shops? If customers enjoy shopping more, won’t our clients earn more? Can forms be fun? What’s the psychology behind online purchases? How can online and offline buying experiences be harmonised? Matt Balara will share some of his 15 years of experience designing web sites, the vast majority of which have sold something or other.
The internet has been around long enough now that it has a proper history, and it has started to produce media and artefacts that live in and comment on that history. James will be talking about his work with writing, books and wikipedia that hopes to explain and illuminate this temporal depth.
We need to decouple the idea of ‘book’ from the mental image we carry around of ‘book.’ The innovation and benefit that digital brings to books and publishing lies less in how digital affects final artifacts, and more in how digital affects the systems leading up to and extending beyond those artifacts.
Web 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.
Most apps suck. Making an app that doesn’t suck is hard work and requires uncompromising focus. We call apps that don’t suck “usable”. However, in the Age of User Experience, making apps that are merely usable is no longer good enough.
Thought SVG was dead? Think again. Once relegated to plug-in status, Scalable Vector Graphics is now spreading rapidly, in browsers, mobiles, and even televisions, with broad native support and graphical script libraries. It’s used on major websites like Wikipedia, Google Docs, and the Washington Post. Whether images or apps, standalone or integrated into HTML, CSS, or Canvas, SVG is a powerful tool in a developer or designer toolkit. With full scripting support, animations, and advanced visual effects, SVG lets you reuse skills you already have. Learn how to use SVG to best effect to add standards-based bling to your webapp or site, see what works and what to avoid, and glimpse where the future lies.
This session will be a solid introduction to CSS3 by way of practical examples that can get you started using CSS3 on your projects today.
Server-side JavaScript has really started to take off, with a number of great projects providing different pieces of the puzzle. This talk will introduce server-side JavaScript and provide an overview of the existing projects as well as some ideas about where it’s all going in the future.
Grid systems have been used in print design, architecture and interior design for generations. Now, on the web, the same rules of grid system composition and usage no longer apply. Content is viewed in many ways; from RSS feeds to email. Content is viewed on many devices; from mobile phones to laptops. Users can manipulate the browser, they can remove content, resize the canvas, resize the typefaces. A designer is no longer in control of this presentation. So where do grid systems fit in to all that?
This talk will be a comprehensive look at what you need to know to properly test your web applications on mobile devices. We’ll look at the different mobile phones that exist, what browsers they run, and what you can do to support them. Additionally we’ll examine some of the testing tools that can be used to make the whole process much easier.
Crowdsourcing applications take indigestible tasks and break them down into digestible pieces, enabling a group to help plough through large scale projects in much shorter periods of time.
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
