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)

A Thursday night out? Drinking? …Again?

But wait, you were out on Monday night too… what gives, Smith?

Ok, I will come clean. Monday’s drinking was less about the drinking (hah!) and more about talking with Chris Mills and Patrick Lauke about presenting, presentation material and subjects around validation and general geekiness. We did not at one point mention any rumour or conjecture about the iPad, which I feel is very important to mention. Leffe and Hoegaarden were order of the evening!

However the Transmission 3 (#tx3) event was different. It was all about the mobile web, the pleasure and the pain of being in this field. There were 3 speaking slots, starting with Chris Mills from Opera giving an overview of mobile to date. Peter-Paul Koch of Quirksmode whose done a ridiculous amount of research on the state of mobile browsing. Finally, two likely lads from down south, Polls and Mills from usTwo, would look at the world of iPhone app dev.

Developing for Mobile Platforms – The pleasure and the pain (ker-tsscchhhhh!)
The talks kicked off with a good overview of mobile history from Chris Mills, the beginnings of mobile browsing, the reasons why it’s prevailant and reasons why it’s a current fave for marketing folks. Good content from Chris, like WAP, earliest networks and general do’s and dont’s about developing for mobile platforms. Interesting to be reminded how far we’ve come with mobile browsing in a short space of time.

PPK on the state of mobile browsers
The amount of time PPK has put into testing mobile browsers is insane. He’s tested, prodded, poked and broke pretty much every flavour on every device. A very interesting sentence from PPK was something along the lines of “on the mobile web, IE does not matter”. IE on mobile is so utterly shit, everyone who has it instantly goes and gets something like Opera Mobile.

The mobile browser usual suspects usually fall into one of two camps, Opera or WebKit. However, that’s not quite as simple as that sounds, there’s about 10 flavours of WebKit browsers, running various Javascript engines, with different switches set at compile time. Still, 95% of what you do in a browser will work on all WebKit devices.

PPK also got quite excited about Widgets and their future potential. Supported by Opera, a widget is a collection of HTML, images, CSS and JS, which is zipped and the extension changed to .wgt. His main gripe is that at the moment wdigets are not allowed device level access, to things like GPS, address book etc, as it’s a massive security concern, but if this can be solved, it’ll be quite the revelation, apparently.

usTwo and a story of iPhone how not-to’s
Polls and Mills were the only iPhone specific talkers of the night, and they had some stories to tell! Completely self-depreciating, the lads put a very funny spin on all the things the did in terms of marketing that would do amazing things like generate sales of… 150 apps.

They build the apps out of pure love, as they don’t spin much money, but as a marketing tool, they get their name out and in the press and chip chip chip away at the media. The apps are cool toys to show current and prospective clients, and open the door to branding and promotional opportunities.

They openly admitted they from a design background, and didn’t talk technical, but their approach to everything was very funny, beating themselves up, but with the underlying current of “yeah, but we’ve learnt loads in the process”.

Comedy moment, when they were talking about their Ben10 MouthOff app, I had bought it a week earlier while sat on the couch on a saturday morning with my son. I fired the app up and had it ready when they asked if anyone had seen it, it was only right to respond with the MouthOff app over my mouth!

Conclusion
All in all, tx3 was great. Very insightful, very inspiring and an area that we as JP74 are actively getting into, very important. More of this please, Digital Sparks!

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.

One of the lads on my regular video gaming forum, NTSC-uk, is getting a Mac, and was asking what apps and widgets people use on Mac. No specifics, just chuck some ideas at him. Here’s what I said;

Quicksilver (keyboard app/file launcher)
Once you’ve tried it, you really can’t be without it.

Perian (xvid/divx/x264 codec)
Plug-in to play divx and many other formats in all apps that use the Quicktime architecture. That means watching x264 .mkv files in Front Row

VLC (movie media viewer)
Better movie player than Quicktime, handles everything, does interlacing and subtitles etc.

Adium (instant messaging)
Like the PC/Linux Pigeon, but better. Handles all forms of IM like MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Jabber and Facebook.

Opera (Browser)
I’m a big Opera fan, and the latest versions are great. They don’t suffer slow down and bloat like Firefox and Safari do. If you use a lot of multiple tabs when browsing, try Opera.

Transmisson (Bittorrent client)
Best BT client on the mac

If you do any design, get FontExplorerX for font handling. Free, and looks like iTunes for your fonts.

This was a top-of-my-head list, so if you’ve got something you use and feel other’s would benefit, lemme know!

Bruce Lawson asked the Twitterverse for a show of hands of Opera users, and their whys, but if not, let him know the reasons. At the moment, I’m an Opera user.

I say at the moment because my browser of choice seems to change on a bi-monthly basis. Being a Mac user, with the whole Mobile Me set-up and an iPhone, there’s a certain amont of comfort in using Safari. As such, I usually flirt with another browser for a few weeks, then fall back to old faithful.

So what sets me off looking to swap browsers?

My line of work has me using a browser for a large percentage of the day. Developing we sites means I usually have Safari and Firefox open all day. While I like Firefox and it’s rane of plug-ins, Firebug being the obvious one, I feel the app is bloated and sluggish. Having more than 8 tabs open for extended periods on a regular basis, and my MacBook Pro starts to stutter when tab flipping. Same with Safari, you have a few tabs open and a few Flash movies and it really crawls.

Ok, so Firefox for work, how about Camino for home? Camino’s nice for a mac user. Built on the Gecko rendering engine, but with a heavily mac-ified user experience, Camino offers a good, mac-like, browsing experience, but there’s a few bits and pieces I don’t like. No way to easily auto-sync bookmarks, slows down like Firefox when lots of active tabs etc. There’s even more choice with browsers now than ever before, with Flock, Omniweb and iCab offering further alternatives, but I’m not going to numb your brain.

Enter Opera. I’ve been aware of Opera since the very first Mac versions around version 5. The first version were not up to much on the Mac, and I never used it for much, not even paying attetion to how sites looked in it. However, as I got more and more conscious of standards based browsing, I dutifully downloaded every version and started tweaking, revelling in how much better Opera was getting.

Recently, this has been amplified by our lead nerd at JP74 being a massive Opera fan. The browser, that is. I respect Nathan’s opinion on many things (except some rather daft allegations he made saying the PC UX was more consistent than a Mac’s) but anything internet related, he’s usually spot on.

Earlier this year, I got an Asus EEE 701. One of the first things I did was install Ubuntu and look for a decent browser. Firefox on an Asus was alright, but the small screen was getting cramped. I tried the latest 9.5 versions of Opera and found the 90% view size was fantastic. This made me start trying the desktop versions on my Mac when browsing out of work.

Before my iPhone, I had a Sony Ericcson K800i, which is a great phone. I was using the Opera Mini browser on it, and tho So now, in my quest for speedy, stable browsing, ths last two months I’ve been using Opera. And this was before meeting the mighty Chris Mills and 1:80 scale punk-epitomised Bruce Lawton! Discussing Opera with Chris gave me a few insights into the company and their views and goals, which I found admirable and honourable.

However, there are a few things I don’t like about Opera. Obviously, the user-interface on the Mac is a travesty. It looks like it was abandoned at lunch time. I reverted to the default Opera skin straight away. Secondly, I really dislike a browser that’s trying to do too much. Mail, RSS readers, Bittorrent… nice idea, but I just want a browser.

With email, I think a stand alone mail app would be a better way to go, like the separation of Firefox and Thunderbird. I don’t need Mail on the Asus as I use Google Mail, just a browser.

The RSS feeds could be passed to a HTML set-up like Google Reader within the My.Opera area of the site, which would possibly encourage a greater user sign-up rate and offer the chance to discover other users RSS feeds etc.

Bittorrent? Transmission. Nuff said.

But seriously, if you’re sick of Firefox bloat, slow Safari tab swapping or just want a change, give Opera a go. It’s compliant, fast, very stable, and a friend of mine, Gareth, who breaks browsers for fun, says Opera’s code rocks. Nerds like Nathan and Gareth reassure me and my current browser choice!

dConstuct 2008, Designing the Social Web is a yearly event held in the Brighton Dome, including speeches and workshops around the topic of the evolving social side of the internet.

After catching a few friends on Twitter and GeekUp talking about dConstruct I thought I’d get myself along to a conference again, as I’ve not been to any for a few years. Being scouse, I blagged a ticket off a friend at .net, one of the event sponsors, booked a hotel and put a call out on GeekUp to see if anyone wanted to split petrol money (of course I’d go by car, a chance for a long war-drive!)

The mighty Chris Mills from Opera took me up on the offer, so on the Thursday 4th Sept. I picked him up on route through Manchester. I’ve worked with Chris a few times before, when he was an editor at Friends of ED, and I was tech reviewing books, so it was good to finally meet face-to-face. The drive down to Brighton (from the North West – 6 hours!) flew by thanks to good conversation and an awesome selection of music from the iPod.

We got to Brighton, dumped the bags, and hooked up with some more ex-FofED’ers, Bruce and Matt, had dinner then headed to the pre-party at Po Na Na. At the club I met up with two more Northerners, Rob O’Rourke (web designing Scouser in Burnley, friend of my youngest brother) and Dan Donald (Here In The Hive), drank a bit and chatted, taking in the faces and clocking the rock stars of the standards world… ahem.

So an early start on the Friday, due to me not really reading the agenda properly saw me at the venue for around 8.50am, where the security guys were keeping the nerds at bay from their validating demi-gods. Brighton was belting down with rain, so everyone was fairly glad to be let in for registration.

Coffee and croissant acquired, a quick wander through the lobby area was in order. Silverback had a gorilla doing the rounds (ok, not a real one, a man in a monkey suit) handing out branded bananas. Nice touch!

Bumped into Pete Aylewood at the Friends of ED stand, another email-only acquaintance, and waited around for Dan, Rob, Matt, Chris or the pint sized walking ASBO Bruce to appear, and head to the first of the seminars.

Steven Johnson – The Urban Web

Steven’s talk was my first taste of the dConstruct event, and I have to be honest I was a bit ignorant as to who he is. However, his discussion of how social networks have been in effect for centuries, with documented data from the last cholera outbreak in London in 1832 proved he knew what the hell he was talking about, and could be interesting with it. The gist of the talk was that for local news, people close to the source are always going to be best, as Reuters won’t be bothering to comment on a car crash on your street. It’s news to you, as you live there, but the rest of the country doesn’t really care.

The ‘long zoom’ of gathering information by a local networker (a man of the cloth in those days) was the key to isolating the cholora cause and Johnson paralleled this with bloggers in his neighbourhood writing up small stories allowed him to see a van on fire in his street, while he was holidaying on the other side of the States. This is where he introduced outside.in and how that gathers your local news from location aware blog searches using human readable terminology.

It was pretty interesting and quite easy to see how it would be relevant to me. For example, if I moved to Spain I’d want to know what the neighbourhood was like where I intended to live. You can get an overview from Google, find out where to eat etc, but it’s the local blogging news that’d be key.

Aleks Krotoski – Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place

Next up was the slightly nervous but energetic Aleks, a video games corresponant from The Guardian, took to the stage and got us started with her talk on, basically, why the video gaming industry should be taking a cue from the open source and social networking side of the web. Aleks clearly likes her games, and banged on about the differences about simple, social games and over-indulgent, beautiful console games.

She asked for a show of hands about how many people were from the games industry at the conference, and how it was strange there were so few (I counted about 10 hands). A fair point, but knowing the gaming industry a little, I wasn’t too surprised. The games industry is not an open bunch, and projects are developed in secret, mainly due to a games gestation period. The speed the web is developing, compared to the time to create a game means that having a game come out at the right time to capitalise on a current social networking darling site would be difficult.

Anyway, Aleks name checked the Dreamcast and Phantasy Star Online, making me nearly jumped out of my chair and yell support. I collared her later and offered to buy her a drink for the Dreamcast reference!

Joshua Porter – Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design

Josh’s talk was pretty good. In a nutshell, it was how people will make choices based on what other people are doing when limited data is available. Human’s act like sheep and follow the crowd if they don’t have enough facts to hand. He used a very funny, old black and white TV clip from Candid Camera, set in an elevator. Four or five people would enter the elevator, one of which was the “sheep”. The others, on cue, would turn to face a certain way in the elevator, and the sheep would always follow. This worked to such a degree, they managed to make one guy take his hat off and put it back on, following the crowd.

He then went on to show interface design techniques that reinforced how popular or good a site was, by showing a “random sampling” of users, of course who were always good looking, participating well on the site etc. Basically playing on the heuristics in decision making. Fairly straight forward if you do use any psychology when designing, but I’m sure a lot of developers in the audience will have clicked with it, as there were some real good points.

One real intersting point he noted was how one large US retailer had seen a sales increase of 20% after removing the need for buyers to register online. Let them buy without it, but paint the fact that they’re not registering as a loss for them. After people have invested time on a site, and completed a few tasks or made the site a little more personal, getting them to register is easier, as they’ve put time in and will suffer a loss as a result of not registering. People suffer from loss-aversion in everything they do.

However, Joshua’s best example of a design that did the hard-sell by repeating the joy of current users was a bit crap. He pointed to FreshBooks as a perfect example of hammering the message home, but to us English designers, the site was a piece of typical American marketing design. I personally think the English taste in advertising and marketing is pretty advanced, and his example probably raised eyebrows and a few wry smiles.

Lunch – The Opera lads, Bruce and Chris along with a few Yahoo! devs were heading for a sushi bar. I hate fish, but Chris persuaded me to come anyway as they’d have some meat dishes. As it turns out, the food was excellent (mostly teriyaki for me) and I made Chris laugh by asking “did I ever tell him I loved sushi?”

Daniel Burka – Designing for Interaction

Designing for Interaction could possibly have been titled “Digging for Interaction” as the Digg site, interface and design decisions were featured prominiantly by Daniel, but since it was a (well known) real world example, and he was very candid when discussing features inclusions and drops, it made for a good focal point.

Some great insites from Daniel about how small design decisions would affect the majority of Digg users, and conversley, how some features the team thought would do well were underused by users (File transfers on Pownce).

Burka also pointed to the loss-aversion tactics in getting people to sign up, as mentioned by Joshua Porter. Let them digg a few stories and get involved, then tell them that if they want to save what they’ve done so far, register. This line of thinking is becoming more and more usual with social networking sites, reel the user in before they sign up, that it was nice to see it nailed by the speakers. He also lamented the crappy Digg sign up process and showed how they’re streamlining it and hoping to keep it as unobtrusive as possible.

It was quite good to hear Daniel candidly talk about how some features had little user-metic testing and were added on a rolling 30 day launch inclusion. Some of the larger features obviously did go through the user testing process, as you’d expect, but I have a feeling few places have the time to test every single new feature. Good to know the big guys do it too.

Tantek Çelik – Social Network Portability

Tantek is well known for banging the MicroFormats drum, so I was hoping this wasn’t the sole-focus of his talk. Fortunately, it wasn’t, and he covered a lot of familiar problems that the social web presents the users, such as “social network fatigue”, the tedious process of entering all of your personal info again and again for each new social site.

Tantek was the only presenter to actually get full on geeky with his slides and drop some code. This was in the MicroFormats section of his talk, and I felt it was a little “preaching to the choir” for this specific audience. While we’re on MicroFormats, I’d been asking most people I knew this week what they thought of them, after hearing the Rissington Chaps commenting on them in their podcast. The general concensous is that they’re a good idea, but there’s no real groundswell movement that will prove to be a tipping point. This was all but confirmed by Tantek when he discussed the Operator plug-in for Firefox that parses HTML pages for the hCard mark up and hi-lites it to the user. I’d used this only on Wednesday this week, so knew exactly what it was. But I feel that if MicroFormats are so good, they should be built into default browser behaviour and deployed on all social networking sites. There’s a lot of movement to get them in the social sites, but I’m unsure as to what the browser vendors think of them.

Çelik also discussed the inherent problems of signing into a multitiude of social sites. He asked for a show of hands as to who had how many social network signups, for which a good portion of the audience had over 20 each (count me in). There’s a few services that provide a unified login place, like OpenID and Chi.mp, plus things like Gravatar that will provide one central point to changing your avatar on supported sites, but at the moment, I don’t think there’s an all encompassing service. First to market will probably ride the wave.

I think the best part of Tantek’s presentation was the dissing of these services embedding Google/Yahoo/Microsoft email address book sharing APIs. You’ve probably seen them, “Oh you’ve signed up, why not see which of your address book buddies use this site.” Tantek gave this a kicking for two reasons. One, that they usually then spam your whole address book because they’re not entirely clear and ever so slightly devious in getting new sign ups during your buddy-checking process, and secondly, because it’s teaching web users bad habits.

By getting a user to provide their username and password when inside another site/service, you’re lowering their guard against online phishing attacks. How easy would it be to start a new online community that on the surface looks like a safe, fun place, that then asks you to connect with your address book mates, and bam, robs your username and password in the process because they fake the Google Address Book API? Bad mojo, man. Don’t teach users bad habits.

Matt Biddulph & Matt Jones – Designing for the Coral Reef

The lads from Dopplr gave the best talk of the day. Their energy, honesty and simple joy in what they were doing was great to see. They talked about how Dopplr did little things to the site that a user only notices over time, and puts a smile on their face despite them having used the site for a few days/weeks/months. They showed how with their site they’re quite happy to launch people off around the web as they know they’ll come back. No walled gardens here, they want to be a trusted reference point of jumping off platform.

A good mix of design and coding theory that goes into Dopplr, and how attention to trivial details is what makes the site sticky and loved, and having heard them talking, I’d feel very happy about recommending Dopplr as a trusted site and a way to go about the social side of things.

Design Matt was great when talking about the feature on Dopplr that extrapolates your distance travelled in a year and matches it to an animal’s top speed. The site’s fastest user is the speed of a whippet, and the slowest users are slower than snail’s, prompting the guys to look for slower moving objects, like the NASA Shuttle crawler! Matt said that he spent waaaaay too long on this whole feature, in terms of research and what to design, but the end users delight proves that the whole thing has been very worth while. Nerds take note, let the designers play with their crayons, as sometimes an idea they have can’t be measured in cost per hour, and it’s worth going overboard with it.

Jeremy Keith – The System of the World

Hmm, that sounds like a pretentious session… but to be fair, Jeremy pulled it off very, very well. Intiially I thought I’d somehow fell asleep at dConstruct and woken up in the wrong conference, such was the sheer nerdity of what Keith was talking about, but with a few name drops of an Asimov series he reeled me back in, and went on a compelling discussion of how estimates of past and future numbers can’t be based on a current time slice, bell distribution curves, Gates has lots of money and MySpace is fugly.

I really can’t begin to repeat the context in which Jeremy recanted this, as he’s obviously done this public speaking malarky before, but his talk was an all encompassing look at social systems and how users interact very differently when there’s a million opposed to the actions of one. Of how it’s basically impossible to predict what we’ll all be doing and which social networking site will be the next big thing.

edit: Jeremy’s now put his talk online in HTML, so you’d best give it a read if you want to know more…

After show party – Above Audio

Before the after-show (oxymoron?) I met up with an old work colleague from the Subnet days who lives in Brighton, so turned up fashionably late… meaning I missed the food. I scrounged a few beer tokens off a Yahoo! dev using the Chris Mills guaranteed winner line, and had a good chat with Brendan Dawes and the mN lads. The atmosphere was good, and when we moved on, we headed to the Old Ship hotel, where I Jedi-mind tricked the bouncer into letting 11 people in who didn’t have a room, downed a lot more drinks, and had my coat nicked by a fellow scouser (thanks @sanchothefat!).

All in all, I thought dConstruct was fantastic. I met a load of people I knew, met many new friends, and learnt something useful and applicable from each and every session. I’ve already said to the lads at JP74 that a few of us will be going next year, and hope to catch up with the people I met at future conferences.

Big shouts of thanks to: Chris Mills and Bruce Lawson from Opera, Brendan Dawes & the mN lads, Matt shuckle, Rob O’Rourke, Dan Donald and of course, everyone involved in the running of dconstruct.

Flickr dConstruct group

Oh, and I found 987 new SSIDs on the war-drive down, in case you’re interested…