Held at The Sage in Gateshead, DIBI is one very few, if not the first, to bring designers & developers under one roof for a day and allow them to listen to some of the industries leading names talk about their experiences and passions.
What made the event great was that both design & development 'tracks' ran side by side, so you could jump between halls depending on what topics you were interested in without worrying about what your 'official' job title was. So if you were developer that wanted to hear about iPhone UI design, or a designer that had an underlying passion to bring their designs to life with a bit jQuery magic, it didn't matter.
Here's a run down of my particular day and a brief idea of what I heard!
Jon McLoone
Using Wolfram|Alpha to build computational applications
To start the day, both tracks got a brief insight into what Wolfram|Atlpha is; what its purpose is; why it isn't, and never will be a 'Google killer' and the small question of how Wolfram Research can make money from it. A few examples of data that can be extracted from Wolfram|Alpha impressed the audience, and Jon answered any questions about the application comprehensively.
Elliott Kember @elliottkember
Pimp your app with jQuery
The Kiwi with a unhealthy obsession for the colour pink kicked off the developer track with a great whirlwind talk around the incredibly powerful tool, jQuery. In 30 minutes Elliot managed to cram in several ideas on how you can implement jQuery to really put some zing into your web apps. Simple tasks like show and hide, to animating elements in or out of focus, to posting Forms with AjaxForm. A difficult topic to explain even if the majority of the audience were already users of the framework and Elliot managed to do this clearly, showing a few tricks along the way to save time when battering the keyboard.
David Singleton @dsingleton
Last.fm vs Xbox
So you have a kickass start-up like last.fm and Microsoft goes and creates an app to hook into your system from millions of living rooms across the globe through their Xbox. Great right? Hell yeah, just the slight issue of how the hell do you cope with the increase in traffic, especially the launch day spike?
David explained the process last.fm took to estimate what traffic they may receive, and after the ‘Oh Sh*t’ moment, how they would deal with this increase. From profiling their API with tools like Kcachegrind; politely asking Microsoft to rework their app so it didn’t send 3 requests just to make the ‘love’ button glow, to heavy caching at several stages of the application stack. David gave some great information and showed that even successful web apps have their problems, such as server fires, or security issues at data centres…..
Gareth Rushgrove @garethr
You're going to need a bigger toolbox
Currently a developer a Glasses Direct, Gareth gave a a brief talk about the many tools a developer has to work with in 2010. In years gone by, it was simply a case of knowing PHP, mySQL and Apache. With those three tools you could pretty much do anything! This still applies, but you now have many alternatives, plus the many, many tools available to make everything faster and more reliable which can only mean one thing, the end user is happier because websites are fast, always online and aren’t waiting for things to happen.
Websites that are known and used by most frequent web users actually have many tools to make up their stack. A few examples are: -
- LastFM
- PHP
- C++
- Java
- Hadoop
- Python
- Twitter
- Facebook
- PHP
- Erlang
- C
- MySQL
- Cassandra
The point here is, you need to know when you stack isn’t up to the job. Are you using the current toolkit because it’s what you know, rather than using a tool that could do a better job?
Gareth showed that many of the tools that some shy away from because they are ‘complicated’, can be implemented relatively simply and costing nothing but time. There was a strong warning in the conclusion of the talk…don’t go bounding in and install all these tools on your production server without testing and learning them first. If you do, something WILL go wrong and your knowledge won’t be large enough to dig you out.
Read more about some of tools Gareth mentioned during his talk here.
Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) @ppk
The touch action
PPK started his 30 minute slot telling us how a few years ago he was bored of the work he was doing. Day in, day out testing in browsers on computers. Luckily he was released from this boredom when he was offered a job at Vodafone testing mobile browsers. He now has many more browsers to play with, through several interfaces such as the mouse, keyboard, trackball and touch. Peter showed how depending on the mobile device being used, different events were fired. For example, how do you fire the hover event with a touch interface such as on the iPhone? How do you replicate the swipe gesture on the iPhone using a mouse or keyboard?
Dan Rubin @danrubin
Blending Usability testing with interface design, prototyping and rapid interaction
Called in at the last minute, Dan gave a polished talk on how he and a team of usability testers took a website that looked AWFUL, but amazingly already had a large turnover, applied a few tried and tested techniques and rules and proved to the client through two sessions with users, that the interface can make or break a conversion.
If you are a designer and told you can’t change the look of the website as it already works to create a turnover of $5 million per year, it must be difficult to make vast improvements. But by applying rules such as a grid layout, and organising the pages with some thought, users found it much easier to complete an order. Even small alterations requested by the client, made during a testing session, made the checkout system completely unusable to customers. This type of testing helps prove many core rules that need to be adhered to in order to make a website ‘useable’.
Andy Clarke @malarkey
Harboiled Web design
Known by many to have strong opinions about what should be done during the design process, Andy gave a great talk giving listeners a brief idea of what his new book ‘Hardboiled web design’ is about.
Using CSS3 and HTML5 shouldn’t be shyed away from, and it isn’t bad to use vender prefix CSS rules to help enhance your websites look. Adding small animations, 3D transformations, or even small effects like text shadows and border radiuses shouldn’t be overlooked just because CSS3 isn’t ‘a standard’.
Browser testing should no longer be a process of getting a ruler on a screen and checking everything lines up exactly the same in each browser, but rather using the tools available in any particular browser to make the experience as good as possible. Why should people using Safari 4 be held back by users stuck in 2001 with IE6! Instead use a tool like Modernizr and detect what you can and can’t do to enhance the website for this visitor. Browser testing in 2010 should be more about checking that a visitor can get the best experience that their browser allows them to. So if the visitor is viewing with Safari 4, add some animation and transitions, and it not, don’t.
A great quote that sums up everything he believes in is “Only geeks have more than one browser installed! Your mum won’t be checking that a webpage looks the same in Safari and IE”.
For its first year, DIBI was a great success, and also being my first visit to the North East, I can also say that was pretty good too! For anyone wanting to go see speakers talk about a whole variety of topics to do with the web, I highly recommend next years DIBI, which is again at The Sage in Gateshead, on 8th June. See the website for more details.
