I have been to about 8 major web development conferences over the past 5 years. So at a rate of more than 1 per year I would say I am quite well placed to comment on whether they are worth the money.
To cut a long story short the answer is YES. If you leave a conference having seen 1 or 2 talks that change the way you think about web development, or you discover something that will improve you as a developer then YES, its worth your while.
Here is a list of the conferences I have been too and what talks inspired me, recharged my pasion for web development or blew my socks off and introduced me to something new.
@media 2005 (I would provide a link but the sites seems to have been pulled down)
At the time Joe was the top dog for all things Web Accessibility. He introduced me to Zoom layouts and inspired me with his drive to make web sties accessible. I loved the fact that after the talk he wanted to invite everyone to the cinema to watch a movie with captions.
Without a doubt the most inspiring talk I’ve heard. I left this conference a changed man keen to learn DOM Scripting as it seemed so simple. I bought Jeremys book soon after the conference and for anyone wanting a clear and simple place to start with DOM scripting I couldn’t recommend Jeremeys book highly enough.
Now I am not a designer but I left this talk wanting to design. I remember sitting in a pub the next day and filling my bag up with promo flyers as I liked the layout and colours. Andy’s a bit of a geezer and his talks are always entertaining.
Nate introduced me to CSS sprites, putting CSS at the top of the page and JS at the bottom. I have never taken so many notes at a talk than this one, my hand was on fire trying to note each of the points.
I had seen Andy talk at @media the year before, and remember him pitching his talk at completely the wrong level, but he got it spot on at the Highland Fling. Andy really opened my eyes with his talk and I started using CSS2.1 straight after this.
I remember thinking to myself, “yeah JQuery is cool but its a bit like cheating” before this talk. But once I saw Johns talk and had a conversation with a random geek at the night out I was totally hooked. JQuery is like crack, once you start using, it’s difficult to get off it.
I felt sorry for Todd, he was trying to blitz through what was probably a 1.5 hour talk in 45 mins. He done a good job and really opened my eyes to ARIA with good tips and excellent examples of real life situations.
I came to the conference wanting loads of HTML5 and CSS3 goodness. Bruce did not let me down, and he threw in some comical think bubbles.
Conferences are funny things, different people get different things from them. I love how you can be listening to a talker and thinking “god this has nothing to do with me”, or “WTF is this dude talking about”, yet the person beside you is totally immersed and will leave the conference thinking thats the best talk of the day. Its really all about what you are hoping to get out of the day(s), but my advice is to keep an open mind, go to some talks that may not be directly related to your own specialised area of work, and make sure you go to the after parties.
I sure there are plenty of folk out there who were at these conferences or indeed sessions. It would be interesting to hear what your favourites were.
After 6 months of frustration I have decided to bite the bullet and get rid of my Nokia N97 and replace it with the HTC Hero. Nokia’s flagship device of 2009 is a big failure and here are a few reasons why:
Setting Up
I wrote a post about 5 months ago detailing the problems I had trying to set up my N97 and get everything synced up with my mac, I wont go into all of that again you can read the post. To sync up the HTC I turned it on, entered my email address for a few accounts and that was it. My mail, calendar, bookmarks, feeds, twitter, facebook and contacts were all in my phone and ready to go.
Touch Screen
The resistive touch of the N97 just doesn’t make sense. Why a smart phone would require you to press hard to make stuff happen is beyond me. At first I liked this since it was my first touch screen, but now I think different. The HTC is quick, responsive and iphone like in every way. Furthermore, If you are not big on the whole touch screen there is even a wee track ball you can use, though I don’t find myself using it much at the moment.
Web browsing
The Web browsing experience is night and day. I think this is down to the touch screen of the HTC which makes the whole ease of browsing a much nicer experience. I find myself sitting on the phone at home browsing on my HTC instead of booting up the laptop now. Added to that I have installed Dolphin browser which allows swiping backwards and forwards between pages and tabbed browsing, all of which make if a more desktop browser like experience.
Apps
Both phones offer the ability to expand with loads of apps but the Ovi stores is a poor mans app store. Its clunky and difficult to navigate, whereas I have found android marketplace simple to use, with an overwhelming amount of choice with loads of free apps.
The N97 came with 32gb hard-drive but installed apps in the small RAM space. Now you can change this to save on the hard-drive but this RAM will still quickly run out as your cache builds from web browsing. This is not a problem if you are prepared to hard reset the phone every 2 months (please not sarcasm)
Reliability
The N97 would take it upon itself to turn off when it felt like it, for no reason and with no warning. The phone would crash when I put it into flight mode to listen to the music player at night and I would sometimes get a multi coloured screen and a line running down the middle every now and then.
After a bit of use the N97 stopped auto rotating when I opened the keyboard, I had to shake the phone to tell it to rotate. When it did rotate the phone didn’t recognise I was wanting to use the keyboard so when you pressed the keys the wrong text appeared.
So far the HTC has just worked. The battery life is poor but I can live with this.
Operating system
Symbian vs Android. In a nut shell Symbian feels like a fancy phones operating system whereas Android is a light desktop.
Music Player
The music player interface on the N97 is a poor user experience. Its pretty much just a list of artists whereas the HTC has a nice visually interface similar to the ipod.
N97 good things (sort of)
Now don’t get me wrong the N97 does offer a few advantages. I really liked the keyboard when it worked and it has an FM radio. The camera has a flash which is a big miss from the Hero, however the N97 flash comes with problems as it suffers from an issue called flash flood which you can fix by colouring in your phone with a permanent marker. £500 pound device + pernament marker = WTF
After some consideration I bought the Nokia 97 last week over a few other phones I was looking at. My decision was based on the camera and FM radio that I felt gave it the edge over the iphone + I am would not be tied to a 2 year contract as I could get the N97 on a 12 month deal.
Unfortunately since the phone arrived I have had nothing but hassle. It is the most user “unfriendly” phone to set up if you are a mac user. I have an ipod touch and friends have the iphone so when my N97 arrived I expected it to be pretty much the same as the iphone/itouch, I would turn it on and everything would just – well WORK. I could not have been further from the truth and have spent endless hours trying to get things syncd up and transfered over from my mac to the phone. So I thought it only fair I share my experience in the hope it may save someone a few hours of there life.
Syncing contacts and calendar – isync is not available for the n97, so you need to do this through google mail. To do this you must firstly remove ovi contacts from you phone as there is some sort of conflict going on, once you have done this it should be fine and the phone should start cooperating. I used mail exchange, which you need to download from the Nokia site. I am a vodafone customer and mail exchange is meant to come pre-installed, but trust me its not. Stick in all your gmail account details and you should be all synced up.
Photos – I had loads of photos on my previous phone and my mac that I wanted to transfer over to the phone and use as contact images or simply just have them available to look through. If you want to do this on the mac your best bet is to transfer them over using mass storage mode when the USB is plugged in and just drag and drop all your images from the mac to the phone. My woes did not there though, the images didn’t appear in the photo browser so I had to (whilst in the mass storage file browser mode on the mac) was change the name of the folder private/101ffc31 to private/101ffc31.old and hey presto the thumbnails of my images appeared instead of a broken image symbol and I could access all my image. PS. They will all be in the download folder.
Music- Music can be dragged and dropped in mass storage mode like the images. Just drop them into a music folder. I didn’t have this folder so I just created one. Once this is done you need to go into the music app and select options/refresh library for the music you added to appear as a choice in the music player.
Thats been my biggest gripes with the N97, its a difficult learning process but I feel I am almost there and starting to enjoy the phone and its facilities. There are promises of a firmware update coming out soon, if you are a vodafone customer like me you may be waiting a while until Version 12 (whatever) has been released, if you are not a vodafone customer there is a good chance the update is already available. Looking into the future there is also a major update coming which offers some really neat extra features but unless you brick your phone you may have a while to wait just like me.
Its been over a year since I last posted anything on my blog or even updated the static pages of this site which were meant to be my portfolio. But like many of my supposed great ideas, this one has fell flat on its ass. I guess I feel I should only blog when I have got something decent to talk about which kind of worries me, do I only have one decent thing to say per year? Answers on a postcard.
So what have I done in the past year. <summary>@media ajax, @media 2008, learned jquery, started playing golf again, rekindled friendships with old college buddies, seen my team play in a european final, been to Barcelona, drank loads of WooWoos (my new and favorite drink)</summary>
Anyway onto the reason behind this creative burst. I am off to pastures new in my career, leaving Tesco Personal Finance in 2 weeks time for the position of senior web developer at STV. I must admit I am disappointed to be leaving TPF as the people I work with are great and the job can be very challenging, however the opportunity my new role presents me is very exciting and looks like theirs is a lot to get my teeth into. I am really looking forward to the challenges ahead, learning loads of new stuff and the extra time in bed each morning.