Also side note, testing Coda from Panic for the first time whilst doing all this. So far really only used the FTP but it is pretty cool so far. Might not look for my old BBEdit disc after all

• Lack of ports- one USB I doubt will cut it.
• No Superdrive - probably not a big deal as the only disc I have put in the my Powerbook in the last 6 months was drivers for installing a new printer. I don’t want to have to buy another one, but they don’t say if any 3rd party drives like the Lacie one I use on my G4 will also work.
• 2 Gb RAM max… and its soldered on!?!?! Great if that gives up and you can’t replace it. Call me power hungry but I would rather run Photoshop, Parallels etc on 4Gb Ram that I can replace if needed.
• Max processor speeds are low compared to the current Macbook Pro lineup. I’m assuming this was probably due to the amount of heat and size generated by the higher speed chips.
• Only supports up to the 23 inch HD Display from Apple. Now I know I like to dream a little, and hope I might one day be able to afford that dream 30″ model (like I can afford to do that any time soon - not) I don’t want to be limited in my choice either. Plus no dedicated graphics, so it’s already eating into that 2Gb RAM.
• Do I need a 64Gig Solid State Hard Disk, sure it should last for 50+ years, but to pay over £800 for the privilege of one. Will the rest of the Macbook Air still work in 50 years? I know what I’m like, I could quickly pack that 64 Gig with all sorts of junk. I need more space please.
• Can’t replace the battery. Apparently they will install it for free and the price is equivalent to any of the other portables, but what do you do in the mean time while they are installing it.
• It’s only going to be about £100 less than entry level Macbook Pro.

I’ll probably think of some more reasons why I shouldn’t pay for the Macbook Air. So for now, I’ll keep waiting for that Macbook Pro update that I have been hoping for the past 3 months. Just hope my 8 year old Ti PowerBook holds out that long, and my Dual 500Mhz G4 doesn’t need another power supply in the mean time while I wait.

Well by day two, the geek in me had taken over and I was writing less notes and taking more photos using my Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3. I’ve posted them all up on my Flickr account so you can go check them out. The Carsonified team have also started uploading Mp3s and slides of the presentations as they become available. You can access these from their past events page. Apart from that here is some of the bits that make sense from the scribbles, er I mean notes, I made on day 2.

Reoccurring theme on day 2 was again Facebook, but also OAuth -”An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”

Paul Graham’s keynote presentation on ‘The Future of Web Startups’:

1. Lots of them
2. Standardisation
3. New attitude to acquisition
4. More risk = more reward
5. Younger, nerdier founders
6. Still need Silicon Valley? Still want Silicon Valley?
7. Also needed: better judges
8. College will change
9. Lots of competitors
10. Faster advances

Leah Culver who is the co-founder of Pownce, and their only full time developer on the platform, discussed the issues involved in Pownce’s development and what they learned along the way. One of the main issues was dealing with and listening to user feedback. To help them manage this process they use a service known as Satisfaction from a third party.

Dave Morin told the story behind Facebook:

• Over 50% users of Facebook returns every single day
• 60 billion pages per month
• Facebook Photos is the most trafficked photo application
• Find out more at Facebook Developers

Simon Wardley’s presentation on ‘Short on Cycles, Long on Storage’ was extremely funny. This guy attempted to display 300 slides within 30 minutes to aid his presentation. Still not completely sure what he was on about, but he really likes Ducks and makes up his own words. He also apologised for his use of Comic Sans at the start of his presentation:

• Commodisation = Yesterday hot stuff (new) -> Todays boredom (common)
• Service stack
• Portration = Portability and choice
• All depends on open source standards
• Commodification -> Commodisation

1. Not a straight line
2. Not always a thing
3. Not everything spreads
4. Acceleration
5. Friend and Foe

Tom Coats presentation was an insight on FireEagle. But it won’t be called that when it is finally released. It is an open API that allows you to develop applications using your current location.

There you are, that’s all I wrote. Well apart from some ideas I have for work which I can’t tell you about, plus some other scribbles I can only just decipher:

• Brown seems to be the developer choice for clothing (even I was wearing my brown Digg.com hoodie so I was just as much to blame as everyone else).
• And the podium on the developer stage reminded me of a McFlurry - something about the shape of it

Gee that was shorter than my last post. (Note to self - next time, write this all up while you are there, cause you are just pants at writing this stuff up.) Can’t wait for the next conference in London. Hope to see you there!

Facebook was mentioned a lot at the conference, and not surprisingly because it has become a very successful web app due to the varied applications a user can install that have been built with the Facebook API. Apparently 50% of Facebook users return to their Facebook homepage every day. There is an app called Scabulous that seemed quite popular with attendees and speakers at the conference. In fact 33% of Facebook users have it installed (not to self - must install and give it a try). There was also the putting down of Facebook and how it creates ‘false’ friendships. Well I am a user of Facebook, and I am under no illusion of the ‘fakeness’. By the way at this point I will say I have never had a MySpace page, perhaps its the snob in me, but I like the way in Facebook you can choose to control your profile and content with people you want rather than the whole world and his dog. I also think its great for finding people who you knew before it was common to have mobile phones. I have found some of my best friends from school on Facebook. I have a feeling this has also done for site such such as Friends Reunited. These sites rarely got updated by members and you had to pay a membership fee to contact someone, where as with Facebook you can just give them a quick poke.

Future of Web Apps prediction from speaker Om Malik: Increased access to email on mobile phones and devices.

The guys from Adobe not only had great presentations on the EXPO floor but were also allocated some time on the main Developer stage. On the Wednesday they did 10 Air/Flex real world web apps in 10 minutes:

1. http://www.sliderocket.com (web based presentation application)

2. http://www.scrapblog.com (scrap book builder)

3. http://www.picnik.com (uses HTML and Flash)

4. http://remix.mtv.com (engine by Adobe Premier Express)

5. http://preview.getbuzzword.com (Adobe liked this so much the bought it, an online wordprocessor and it all works inside the browser)

6. http://www.finetune.com (web streaming music on your desktop)

7. http://desktop.ebay.com (currently in beta)

8. http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/mediaplayer.html (Adobe’s Media Player)

9. http://pownce.com (Air application you can download rather than using the website)

10. http://www.aboutnico.be (Air application for Google Analytics)

Steve Souders presentation on High Performance Websites:

• IBM Page Detailer - Tool that shows developers client-side performance
• Less than 20% of the time is spent dealing with a page request on the server, the rest of the time is spent on the clients’ browser, so 80% to 90% is spent on the end user’s response time. This means the client side has a greater potential for improvement, its simpler to deal with and is proven to work.
• Research has shown than 50% of people come to a website with an empty cache, so it is important to optimise for both cached and non-cached users.

• Rules of best practice (items higher up the list reduces response time the most):

1. Make fewer HTTP requests.
2. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network for static content).
3. Add an expires header.
4. GZIP components.
5. Put Cascading Style Sheets at the top.
6. Move Scripts to the bottom (browsers will evaluate the scripts before rendering the rest of the page).
7. Avoid CSS expressions.
8. Make JS and CSS external.
9. Reduce DNS lookup.
10. Minify JavaScript.
11. Avoid redirects.
12. Remove duplicate scripts.
13. Remove ETags.
14. Make AJAX cache-able.

• Another tip: set source of IFRAME’s using JavaScript. The onload event is delayed by 40-50ms until the IFRAME’s src responds.
• For more information check out the book ‘High Performance Websites’ (O’Reilly), Yahoo! User Interface Blog, and the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog.
• YSlow - This is an extension to the FireBug extension for Firefox that can help you measure performance and spot bottlenecks.
• Final thoughts - focus on the front end, harvest the low hanging fruit (what people say, eh), you DO control user response times, so be an advocate for your users and LOFNO (look out for number one)!

Dion Almaer in his presentation ‘How to take your app offline’ spoke about Google Gears and how it was, “a little more than just AJAX”. Consisting of 3 main parts: LocalServer, Database and WorkerPool. The WorkerPool allows you to run JavaScript jobs asynchronously in the background. Google Reader already works offline, and it is expected that more is to come, such as Google’s office suite and Google Mail. Read more at Dion’s website at Ajaxian.com.

Robin Christopherson’s presentation ‘The Art of Attractive Yet Usable Websites’ was really interesting and a real eye opener for someone who already understands accessibility issues and an understanding of best practices in relation to these issues because we got to see first hand what it was like for a vision impaired user to not only navigate using a screen reader (he was using IBM’s now defunct Home Page Reader) on websites, but also on an operating system. Here are some bits I picked up:

• It still takes users 20 minutes to get to the main content of Amazon as they still do not have skip to content navigation links. Nor do they have almost all the images in the navigation appropriately labeled with alt tags, so that the screen reader has to tell the user of each image reading aloud all the long filenames.
• Google Mail has a basic version of their core functionality for those using screen readers, and is completely JavaScript free.
• Google Maps has a screen reader friendly version, that hardly any one knows about - try it at http://maps.google.co.uk/?output=html
• Google has an audio alternative for those Catchpas on sign up forms, but are still misinterpreted. Alternatively they provide a helpline via email where they will contact you directly to setup your account if you are still having problems.
• Should include audio descriptions for rich media - demonstrated this using a scene out of star wars with audio description turned on.
• Showed the magnification tool that comes standard with Windows.
• Users are unable to increase text size easily because they don’t know where the functionality is hidden in the browser to do so
• A lot of sites that do allow users to increase the size of text do not allow for large text sizes properly in their layouts, causing text to overlay on top of each other and therefore unreadable.
• Some users choose to ignore website defined colours - Robin showed an example of this on The Apple website where turning off the colours cause some of the main heading to disappear.
• Moving, small target menus/links difficult to navigate to and/or click on and can cause problems for users with arm movement difficulties.
• Websites with bizarre tabbing order can be confusing.
• Problems with user generated content such as MySpace, use of tiled backgrounds, chosen colours choices etc are difficult to read and understand.
• Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool (PEAT) - Tool from the Trace Center helps developers identify content on their site that might induce seizures in some people.

‘Design for Web apps vs the web’ was Daniel Burka first public speaking presentation at a conference, and it was highly insightful into how they deal with user feedback on Digg and Pownce.

• Only make a change if it is worth it. Makes changes that will benefit the whole community rather than the one user.
• Know your community and stay in touch. Let them know about what bugs or features you are rolling out, and know when to admit when you have got it wrong.
• Measure success of changes, use focus groups and usability studies
• Gather feedback from a range of place: Positive feedback, negative feedback, bug reports, expert feedback and implicit feedback (watch how people use the site)
• How to react to feedback - first don’t do anything! Don’t rush in to change things.

Matt Mullenweg’s presentation on ‘The architecture behind wordpress.com’ did exactly what it says on the tin. He talked about scaling, the platform used, business, community and the people. The main part at the end was a warning not to hire someone you have doubts about.

Mathew Haughey’s ‘Building a community’ presentation was all based on the idea of “social is at the heart of todays web”. He believes that any site or app that you develop should include some form of social component. Problem is that there is a potential for a big disaster, but when it’s right it really becomes successful.

• Need to have a really compelling idea to begin with.
• Build the best app you can.
• “Eat your own dog food” - be the best user of your app.
• Highlight the best bits.
• Recognition helps too - give users who are really passionate about your app some level of responsibility.
• Get your best contributer to help moderate.
• Sometimes it is just best to get out of the way.
• Build it with some flexibility and allow unintended uses.
• Run it well with guidelines, not rules.
• Keep emotions out of decisions.
• Tailor to community norms, whatever they find comfortable.
• It’s a balancing act.
• Going to come across ownership issues, and every community suffers a revolt eventually.
• Customer service is important, and you may end up spending more time on this and coding.
• Hire help early on if you can.
• Use metrics to ease the workload.
• Avoid disaster by being transparent, have a place to talk about the app or site and (over) explain changes.
• Acknowledge mistakes.
• Be prepared for legal trouble. Some things are illegal in some places and not others. There will be many lawsuit threats, though actual lawsuits are few.
• Work out what’s stopping your app or site from building a community. Find a balance and build it to an even keel. Successful communities will create ‘friend revenue’.
• Need good “seed content” to get started and attract a community - highlight the best bits.

I really enjoyed Heidi Pollock’s presentation on ‘Taking your application mobile’, and I remember back in the day when we first were thinking about doing this kind of thing and how shit WML was. Well apparently it is still a struggle to design for mobile. Completely the reverse of how I thought things might be by now - though we no longer have to content with WML. Screens with resolutions of 176px wide and downloads of 10k maximum are the kind of restraints designing for mobile in mind currently have. Mobiles are not anywhere near as advanced as we expected them to be by now. Heidi comments that designing for mobile, “is like throwing a dart at a board and hoping it sticks”. She works for a company called BluePulse, which are currently tracking 3,000 mobile phones. With over 3,000 phones to deal with, you are bound to get errors on some of them. And access to mobile web application are generally not on high end phones.

Coding wise she recommends using XHTML 1.0 mobile - not 1.2, for markup and some basic CSS. Not all off CSS is supported. Don’t expect the code to validate and you will have encounter bugs on some phones. Opposite to what I previously believed, she abandons the idea of semantic web on the mobile platform because it rarely works. Headings are too large and ugly, taking up too much screen real estate, and lists take up to much space in the code. Recommends you stick to ems or small pixels for measurements. Other points raised include:

• Only bring to mobile what your users will use when they are ‘bored’ or actually need.
• Preserve your brand with colours and logos.
• Navigation links are overrated.
• Users prefer search rather than selecting from a 200 option dropdown menu. And not all dropdown menus well function the same on all phones.
• Never go above 16k for page downloads.
• During development produce a device list to test against, think like a phone, learn to live with how it works rather than what you would like it to do.
• Mobile acid test - similar to the browser acid test.
• Expect different behaviors on different phones, even on the same phone on different networks. (And you thought it was bad with Web Browsers )
• JavaScript and AJAX does not yet have a use case on mobile as it takes way too long to download and process with the bandwidth limits.

John Resig talked about the future of Firefox and some of the advances of JavaScript in his presentation on ‘Cross Platform User Interfaces’. Including:

• SVG support in Firefox
• Offline support
• Offline/Online detection
• XMLHttpRequesy++ (cross browser support)
• Desktop Integration
• Firefox 3 support for JavaScript 1.8, Firefox 4 may support JavaScript 2
• Tamarin - the three monkies: ActionMonkey, ScreamingMonkey and IronMonkey

Kevin Rose’s presentation ‘Lessons learned from launching a web app: The stories behind pownce’ were in really lessons learnt from setting up 3 start ups in 4 years. Key points were:

• Make sure you can scale your app easily from the start
• Memcached
• Hire a DBA to review database
• Hire an Admin to review apache configuration
• Work with the community
• Using invitation features such as importing contacts from address books has been important to their user growth
• Use icons that mean and are recognised by users, for example rather than using a mailto: link, use mail program icons instead
• Be transparent and blog what’s going on, improvements and changes
• When Digg was first lauched it was built using PHP, and then moved on to Python.
• Leah at Pownce was excited by Django and so gave it a try for the Pownce site
• Don’t go for VC funding untiyou have a working app
• Plan for success!

Live Diggnation filming was just Awesome!

Notes from day two to follow (sorry for the long post)…

So I go into the shop and on the shelf they have a 1.8m VGA extension cable for £24.99. 1.8m was definietly going to be too short. Annoyingly, the bit labelled up 3m VGA extension was empty. So I go ask a member of staff if they have any, just in case they are hiding them in the back or something. First off he takes me back exactly to where I was looking. That is just so annoying when they do that. Then he goes asks a colleague, and comes back again. So then I ask if they have an s-video extension instead, to which he goes back to his colleague, comes back to me and tells me they do, but then he can’t find anything on the shelf. After about several more times waiting going backwards and forwards for about 20 mins, the guy goes, “well, you could always buy 2 of the 1.8m VGA extensions”, to which I said no way at a total price of £50 for something that I knew would still be too short. So I left empty handed.

Just about to get in the car and give up, when I think that maybe, just maybe, that Staples (or Office World whatever they are called) might possibly do some cables. Took a little time to find them cause they were hidden away, but they had the 3m VGA extensions for £9.99 each. So I bought 2 of them. 6m worth of VGA extension cable for less than a 1.8m cable from PC World. And they were both Belkin ones in the same packaging.

So moral of story, no matter how desperate you are, don’t even try to buy anything at PC World. The likelyhood it will be in stock are slim, and if it is it will be way over priced. I should really know better. (BTW - Diggnation on 37″ HDTV does look indeed look awesome.)

So I had been to the Future of Web Design event back in April, and that was ok, but it felt like the companies they had speaking there was really trying to push you to buy or use their product, or just using it more as a platform to boost their company profile. However, with the expo floor this event, they were able to keep sponsorship messages down to a minimum. Plus the sessions themselves were only half an hour, which ensured that the speakers gave all the key issues in what time limit they had. There were some really great stands on the EXPO floor too. I was really impressed by the Adobe stand. They were giving away free books, had a couple of Nintendo Wiis to play, and were giving live demonstrations of Adobe Air, not just what you could do with the technology, but also how to do it. I remember seeing them demonstrate Air (or as it was known back then as Apollo) but not really feeling impressed by it. Now I really want to build with it.

In terms of the speakers and the presentations, I pretty much kept to the Developer track (- but I didn’t miss out on the other track cause they were selling the Conference in a Box package for a really good deal, so good i ended up buying another 2 Conferences in a Box discs) which was really well run and directed by Simon Willison (check out his blog at simonwillison.net). I could tell you about all the speakers presentation’s and their content, but the nice guys at Carsonified will be adding MP3s of each to the website shortly so go check that out. I have a whole bunch of notes with some key pointers that I picked up, so I will blog them separately later when I have a bit more time.

I took a load of photos of the whole 2 days, about 400 in total. Of course, since it was me taking them, a good proportion of them are a bit dodgy and slightly blurry. I put them on Flickr, but forgot there is a limit to how much they show. So you can at least see some of the Diggnation filming and day 2 of the conference. The tag for all photos from the event posted to Flickr is ‘FOWA’, so if you do a search on that you will get a good indication of what the conference was like. (Note to self: Look into getting a Pro Account at Flicker, cause with the amount of photos you take at these things, you are going to need one!) Anyone else notice that the speaker plinth looked a bit like a McFlurry cup? No, just me?!?

I’ll talk about how awesome the live Diggnation filming was later. I’m still trying to get over it.

Last thing I’d like to add is I met a bunch of great people down at the conference and at the after party, but I didn’t catch all your names, so drop us a line to say hello if you happen to come across this blog post

Of course the selling point for me was the fact that Kevin and Alex are coming all the way over to the UK to film a live Diggnation podcast. So I was making every effort possible to get there. Just know it’s going to be awesome!

So if you spot me around, say ‘Hello’

Now I love my Apple products. I still love my old G4 even though it is now on it’s second power supply, and am I currently sat here typing away on my 6+ year old PowerBook even though the DVD drive is starting to really struggle. (I actually want to get a new Mac, but I keep changing my mind about which one but that’s another story…) And I think my Apple Video was one of the best products I’ve ever been given for a Birthday present. I use it all the time at home connected direct to the TV to watch video podcasts PixelPerfect and Diggnation (both Revision3 productions). Oh hang on I am digressing here a bit… but basically I am a fan of the Mac.

So I guess it was expected, with the move over to Intel, and iTunes successfully moving over to the PC (and well Windows media player sucks so why wouldn’t it). But I’m a bit worried that it may not be that successful or at least not gain the market share they hope. Firstly, it is known amongst some developers that the fastest browser on the Mac at the moment is Camino. Safari and Firefox just doesn’t seem to be as fast. Yes, standards compliance is important, but if something takes for ever for some JavaScript to run, you ain’t going to hang around. However notice that they don’t even list that it the comparison charts. You can’t even download this Beta unless you have upgraded to the latest OSX either which also sucks. (A problem we have in the office at the moment as we are still stuck on OSX 10.2.)

But I think what is really ironic is that the screenshots of Safari they have on the Apple.com website is displaying Yahoo. Now as a Mac user I know I can’t view Yahoo Mail Beta in any other Browser but Firefox (and some other weird one I’ve never heard of). Hoping this might have changed I have downloaded the Beta and tried again, but no we are still not allowed in. I will assume this will be the case for those on PC too. So why would anyone change from a great browser that is Firefox, and well if you’re using Internet Explorer, do the right thing you know you want to, and switch over to Firefox, if you can’t even check your Yahoo email. Come on Apple and Yahoo, I think it’s time you resolved this issue.