Last night, I spoke at the latest Opera back standards>next gig, hosted at MadLab in Manchester.

Chris Mills put the call out months ago, asking if I’d like to take part, and could I herd up anyone else to speak. I recommended my fellow skating (albeit inline-blader!) and Fudge front-ender Mike Byrne as he’s a lively character, and certainly knows his shit, and that made four. Chris kicked off, followed, by myself and Typography Online.

Next up, Opera’s own Patrick Lauke talked (and talked) about media queries and viewports, which is very topical to work we’ve been doing this last week. Finally, Mike rocked up and went balls deep with CSS3 animations and transforms, loads to learn.

So, as promised, here’s my slides, and here’s some of the example code… enjoy.

Example type effects with CSS3 code

• 3D text 1
• 3D text 2
• 3D text 3
• Retro 3D
• Inset 1
• Inset 2
• Neon
• Stroke (webkit)
• Stroke and glow (webkit)

As part of my on-going relationship with D&AD and my commitment to the D&AD North Committee, I was asked to take part in a Student portfolio surgery session at the Leeds College of Art & Design.

Up and at ‘em at silly o’clock, as a few of my Leeds based twitter friends had warned that traffic could be terrible, but I did manage to get there in good time. Yes, Leeds morning traffic is crap.

Slightly nervous as to how the session was going to go, it was great to see James and Stuart from Thoughful, who’d done a session in Newcastle the day before. I admire the amount of get up and go these guys have, and a quick chat with them put me at ease.

Personally, I like to get involved with design students and help where I can, because I was one too. Me and my mates through college did some pretty hair-brained things, tried out some ridiculous ideas… and all seemed to get good jobs from it!

I’ve also been on the other side, recruiting students. Seeing their work, their attitude, from the nervous to the cock-sure and trying to help them get things in order to impress.

So doing the portfolio surgeries wasn’t a massive leap from this. In a nutshell, the students presented their work, talked me through it, I asked what they wanted to do next, graphic design? media? What was strong in their portfolio, how to put it the work in order and feel confident talking about it, how to present their work, and how to be themselves.

I think it’s massively important to let your personality shine through in an interview situation. If you’re going to work in a studio, you’re gonna spend more waking hours with your colleagues than you do with your partner! In which case, you’d better be up for having some fun, able to discuss the most random and mundane crap, pitch in and help, and be an all round superstar junior. Make yourself indispensable.

I’d rather take someone whose work was solid, with streaks of inspiration but consistent and a get-along attitude to everything, than some knock-out designer/programmer whose work was awesome but they were above their station. A bit of humbleness and a very willing attitude goes a long way…

Having said that, all the students I spoke to were excellent. Motivated, talented, eager to talk about what they’ve done and ideas of where they’re going. Some of them, I couldn’t even give pointers to how to present their work better. It was quality, it looked “finished” with that extra 5% of work (a skill a lot learn in the trade, not in education), in which case I was there to urge them to think about how to get in front of Mr. Creative Director, deflect negativity and make it hard to turn them down.

Good luck to you all!

I’m really pleased to say that the whole Liverpool session of Speak The Web went down really well.

I managed to get through 30 minutes without committing social hari kari or making too bigger tit of myself. Pat Lauke was in full on Opera and HTML5 brainwash form, but energetic and interesting enough to be different from Chris Mill’s session at Leeds. The coup de grâce was obviously Simon Collison of Erskine Design, with his In the Pursuit of Magic presentation, and fair play to him for being drugged up but persevering and putting on a really thoughtful and inspiring presentation.

I really enjoyed my 30 minutes of fame and cannot believe how quick the time flew by. Starting at slide 1, with a counter at 00:01, it’s quite scary, but I felt that after a few slides I got into step quick enough. I’d seen Andy Clarke at Leeds, and had heard that Elliot Jay Stocks and Andy were coming to the Liverpool session. No pressure then! Fortunately, I’d had a few beers with Elliot in Manchester a couple of weeks before, and he turned out to be a thoroughly down-to-earth nice bloke, and we share a lot of common ground with our musical tastes.

There were *loads* of things I’d tried to remember to say, but completely forgot, but also quite a bit I just threw in on the spot. Preparation made this possible, and knowing your subject material!

A bit about why I chose my subject matter, to give you some idea of the decision making as a speaker. When writing the presentation, I didn’t know how the room was going to be split, in terms of designers, front end devs and coders, which is why I asked for a quick show of hands. That made it clear that front end devs were out in force, so hopefully I pitched that well.

I was also aware that I was merely the warm-up act for this gig, and it was my first time speaking at a conference for a long time, so I couldn’t afford to be too esoteric or banal (no, I’m not suggesting Colly was!) but knew I had to be fairly straight forward, but be competent in what I was presentating.

So thank you very much to Dan Donald and Rich Clark for organising the Speak The Web events and inviting me to be part of it all, and thanks to everyone who said hello on the evening, and to all those who’ve followed me on Twitter. I hope you stick around…

Here’s my presentation from the night, and you’ll find Pat and Colly’s on the slideshare.net site.

There’s an uproar at the moment on the interwebs. You may have heard about it.

The iPad will not support Flash.

Just like the iPhone before it, the Flash plug-in cannot and will not run in the iPad’s browser. Apple say it’s because the Flash plug-in is the single biggest cause of Safari crashes. I can’t say I’d blame them for being pissed. The window to the internet on your default install can be crippled by a third party proprietary plug-in. Not cool.

So, because Apple have a closed platform in the iPhone and iPad they can choose who plays ball.

A lot of web folks are predicting the end of Flash. It’s on it’s way out. along with HTML5 putting the boot in and promising to handle streaming video (possibly Flash’s biggest single use online) with acceptable CPU levels on a Mac, there will be a decrease in the plug-in, whilst this may be true, I don’t see a funeral anytime soon.

If you also look at who’s screaming til they’re blue in the face, we see something interesting. It’s mostly (if not all) Mac using standards authors who’re quick to announce Flash’s passing. Mac users. A minority group who’ve been consistently bummed by Adobe and their plug-in technology for over a decade. We’ve been second-hand citizens for years with both the Flash authoring app and the web plug-ins. I know people who, years ago, turned from Mac to PC, because their core skill was Flash, and that was an utter cluster-fuck on a Mac.

Even today, watching a 2.something GHz Mac CPU tilting at 50% when running a YouTube video isn’t fucking funny. It’s obscene, and a slur to all Mac users. Adobe should not be surprised the oppressed masses are now turning.

But really, that’s just the technology, what about the software and possibilities it presents?

I have a long history with Flash, which has to some extent tailed off in the recent years. I remember being completely confused by FutureSplash, before it was acquired by Macromedia. I saw my whole world change with the introduction of ActionScript, not the clicking of option boxes, and the fear that I might not “get it”.  I was invited to the launch of Flash 5 with Subnet, in London with a handful of other companies such as Kerb and Razorfish, teams of young talent who’d been reared on video games and enjoyed creating something new. I’ve written chapters and articles, tech reviewed, demoed and taught Flash. I know it pretty well.

If Flash goes, we’ll lose important things on the web. Diversity, experimentation, inspiration and art. Flash is the single quickest way for a designer to do something quirky, with audio and animation, to tell a story or create an experience, then publish it to the internet. While I’m not Flash’s biggest fan, I still think it has it’s place, and more so now that it’s being used to create elements of a site rather than doing whole sites within Flash.

I don’t think Flash will die, and really I hope it doesn’t, because the bar for entry into web authoring for young designers and coders may be raised so high, and focussed so narrow, it will stop a lot of abstract and creative talent getting involved.

So just be careful what you wish for.

Finally, just a shade over six months after being propositioned by the mighty Chris Mills to do some writing, my article is online!

The site, dev.opera.com is a resource aimed squarely at people who are web-literate and happy to get their hands dirty in code. However it’s quite techy, and not too design-led, either theory or practice.

Chris asked me to get involved and write an article that fused a bit of design know-how with technical ability, and since we’d just finished the GDR Creative Intelligence web site at work, which features sIFR heavily, I thought sIFR would be an ideal candidate.

The article didn’t actually take six months to write, it was done in fits and bursts, mostly while in Spain on holiday, but took a while to get edits done as Mills, in his capacity as Opera’s Developer Relations drinker is all around Europe at conferences and spreading the good word.

So, without further ado, here’s my article… I hope you find it useful.

Pixelmator‘s been making in-roads into designers/programmers toolboxes on the mac for a year or so now. You may have read or heard about it on the various Mac news sites, it’s a light-weight image editor, built on Cocoa, passing graphics tasks off to your graphics chip, challenging Photoshop etc.

Some of it’s hype, some of it hyperbole, but what can’t be ignored is that Pixelmator’s a great app that’s turning heads. And it’s $59. No, that’s not a typo.

I grabbed a beta of Pixelmator when it first launched and was mildly impressed. On a recent MacHeist bundle, Pixelmator was one of the apps, to which I thought, bonus, I’ll try it out more.

One to watch, I thought, a feeling echoed by long time friend and graphics man, Mark Coleran. He felt that while Photoshop was such a bohemoth, and with a prohibitive cost as a major entry barrier for casual users or coders needing a solid graphcis app, there was a market area for someone to sneak in, steal a user base and make in-roads, all for about 40quid.

So as a long time Photoshop user and beta tester, where would Pixelmator fit in my workflow?

I usually have Photoshop open at any given time of the day, so when I’m working away coding/debugging HTML and CSS I might not use an image editor much, but if the need arises, and I see Photoshop isn’t open for any reason (as I look in my dock, the icon’s there and lit alright) I’m almost frustrated as I know it’ll take a set amount of time to open, and if I’ve got Parallels, 4 browsers, Transmit, Coda, Textmate, CSSEdit, Adium and iTunes (natch) then opening Photoshop can start the old disk swap shuffle.

Enter Pixelmator. It opens in a flash, provides pretty much everything I’ll need at hand in an image editor, and looks very tidy. Small memory footprint and great handling of many varied graphic formats is a big plus, so you can see where, in a pinch if I’m mid-code/task/mental thread and don’t want to lose a thought, why I might pitch for Pixelmator over Photoshop.

Pixelmator also integrates into the Mac OS very well, providing access to the iSight camera, iPhoto libraries and hooking into Automator. This means it’s excellent for streamlining repetitive tasks and going one further with file manipulations or other Automator related cleverness.

In the last week, I received an email from the Pixelmator team inviting me to try the 1.3 beta, better known as Tempo. The new beta boasts massive improvements when handling big images, which is great, as I deal with a lot of images from print designers, plus some very powerful tools like the Instant Alpha selector and colour wheel tools. Pixelmator is bringing back the enjoyment of exploration in a graphics package, something I’ve not had since Photoshop 3 introduced layers…

So, there’s gotta be something bad, yeah?

Yes, there most definitely is. Pixelmator is crying out for some “Save for web…” options.

There are none. You can save as a JPEG or GIF, with very little control over either. The omission in today’s software world of such obvious feature sets leaves me scratching my head. Pixelmator is a beautiful app. It ticks boxes for the “delicious generation” of mac users, and would nestle nicely in a coders tool set. The Tempo beta I tried may not be feature complete yet, and these things may be on the way, but as it stands, it’s a glaring omission.

But would I recommend Pixelmator?

Of course! If you’re a student or begrudge spending a lot on a tool you’ll use seldomly, try Pixelmator (free 30 day demo!) and see if you like it. If you like the sound of some of the benefits I’ve listed here, give it a go. In fact, give it a go simply to challenge the dominance of Photoshop.

The more I use Pixelmator (and the more they update it), the more I like it.

But please lads, sort out the save for web options!