fordie’s Blog

Last night at the Burlington Hotel, during the biggest thunderstorm so far this summer we had the first Worthing TweetUp.

Considering this is something that started as an idea I mentioned to David Rosam in passing two or three weeks ago I was pretty pleased with the turn out. David & I were there along with Jala68, Loudmouthman, Spidernix, Steaders and Clive Flint.

It was an informal event with everyone sat round a table chatting about everything from social networking to photography and the Russian Mafia! Loudmouthman managed to stream some of it to qik, and Clive has posted some photos to twitter.

We were also joined for a while by a lovely – very scared collie called bones who’d run away from her owner on the seafront during the storm.  She ran straight into the bar at the hotel & took up residence under our table.

It was really good to meet everone last night, I’m planning to arrange another meetup in a few weeks, probably at a different venue (hopefully somewhere with WiFi) so keep an eye on this blog and upcoming for more information.  Incidentally, if you are interested in sponsoring future events please get in touch.

Last year A List Apart ran a survey to try and get a picture of the state of the web design industry globally. The results made quite interesting reading.

This year, they’re doing it again, it should make for an interesting comparison.

It only takes a few minutes to complete, why not pop along and add your details to the mix?

The other day I got chatting to David Rosam on  Twitter when we discovered that we lived very close to each other.  It occurred to us that there were probably a number of other Twitter users in the area, failing that it seemed likely that there would be lots of freelancers & assorted geeks Worthing and surrounding areas.

So, we’ve decided to have a go at getting as many people together as we could.  The proposed TweetUp is an informal social event, it’s a chance to get to know your fellow geeks / freelancers / twitter users, bump your gums and press some flesh all in the pleasant surroundings of Gio’s bar at The Burlington on Worthing seafront. We’ll be there from 8pm on Wednesday the 6th of August 2008.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in then please indicate your interest on our upcoming page.

You don’t have to be a twitter user to attend, nor do you need to be a freelancer. In fact anyone is welcome to come along – who knows what might come out of it?

Back in April I attended Future of Web Design 2008; a two day event with a conference on Thursday and Workshops on Friday. On the Friday afternoon I attended a session on Guerrilla Usability Testing run by Andy Budd from Clear Left.

Usability testing is something I’ve been itching to do properly for years; I’ve been trying to sell the idea to various bosses ever since I read Steve Krug‘s excellent Don’t Make Me Think.

Andy’s session demonstrated that effective usability testing really is within reach. He started off with a real world example – getting people who don’t drink much wine to evaluate three different bottle openers. This had the rather pleasing upshot of there being several open bottles of wine that needed consuming during the course of the afternoon. From there Andy moved on to the main presentation which was informative and entertaining, you can see a version of the slides he used here.

At the end of the session Andy announced that Silverback, the application that clear left had been making a noise about for a couple of months was in fact a tool for doing usability testing on the mac, and we would all be getting a beta copy to play with. As a recent mac convert I was keen to give it a spin.

At work we had already scheduled in some usability testing on the product we are developing so I was able to try Silverback out almost straight away.

Silverback is incredibly straightforward to use, you create a project and then set up a new test session with in that. In your web browser of choice you navigate to the site you’ll be testing then, when you are ready to start your test click “Start Session” in silverback, the screen fades to black with the words “press SPACEBAR to start” displayed in large friendly letters.You can pause and restart recording during the session, using your apple remote if you have one. Youcan also use your remote to mark places where your tester runs in to difficulty apparently.

Once you have finished your test you can make notes and export the session. I love the way Steve the gorilla taps his foot and drums his fingers on his clipboard while the export takes place.  What you end up is a quicktime movie like the one below with the isight & screen capture videos combined, Sweet!

My Silverback Demo

The movies are incredibly useful for understanding how users will interact with your site, they’re a very persuasive tool for getting colleagues to rethink functionality.

I think Clear Left have done a great job with Silverback, we’ll definately be buying a license when they launch the product.

A note about recording audio with the mac mini

Our mac test box in the office is a mac mini running tiger, so it has no isight camera or built in mic.  I had real fun and games trying to get the audio to work, eventually I discovered that the line in on the mac mini requires an amplified source so standard PC microphones will not work.  The best solution this problem was to purchase a USB microphone – we bought this one from Logitec it’s plug & play and works a treat.

If you’re anything like me (by which I don’t mean greying & fat) then you’ll probably take more than a couple of gadgets on holiday with you. This can cause issues when trying to charge them all at the end of the day.

This year the solution hit me – rather than taking a load of adapter plugs I just took one and plugged a UK 6 way extension cable in to it.

I realise that this isn’t an earth shattering idea but it made my life easier.

Those fine fellows at clear left are once again running dconstruct the peerless Brightonian one day web conference. I was there last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Hopefully my boss read his email last week and remembered to book my ticket, but in case he didn’t I decided to enter the competition for a ticket.

So here is my slightly tongue in cheek offering. I hope that the clear lefties will take it in the spirit in which it’s intended & that Erin is able to forgive me when she’s old enough to be offended.

When purchasing software online you expect the process to go something like this:

• Choose your software
• Add to cart
• Pay
• Download Software

nice and simple & stress free. Unfortunately some companies don’t get it – Tomtom I’m looking at you.

Yesterday I decided to purchase the Tomtom maps of Western Europe in preparation for our holiday next month, so I spent £60 (approx $120 US) on the map and nearly a day later I’m still waiting for it to be “delivered”.

The Tomtom  map purchase experience goes like this:

• Choose map
• Add to Cart
• Confirm your Tomtom account details
• Pay
• Get a screen that thanks you for your purchase and tells you that you will receive download instructions “shortly”
• Receive thank you email
• Receive invoice email
• Wait!

Now the thank you screen did say that if I waited more than 24hrs for the download details to get in touch, but frankly I think having to wait more than a few minutes is too long – if I’m buying a software download I want it now, not tomorrow. Come on Tomtom, sort it out.

FOWD 2008 got off to a promising start when I met Jeremy Keith getting off the Tube, we chatted as we waited in the monster queue outside Kensington Town Hall about a wide range of topics from DOM Scripting and Microformats to our new Macs.

I had intended to “live blog” throughout the day , but in the end I didn’t Jeremy has a pretty good summary of the days event on his blog. On the whole the sessions were very good – there were a couple of low points, namely the sponsors “little chats”.

Far and away the worst was buy some guy from an agency who had used Silverlight to develop a new “car configurator” for Aston Martin; He long overstayed his welcome on stage and by the end of it everyone was properly confused as to the point of the whole thing. When the Adobe rep got up in the afternoon to do his Flash / Flex presentation and produced not one but two car configurators we all had a good laugh.

Paul Boag did a great job of putting together and chairing the day, his “talky bits” could have been fleshed out a bit, I think Paul is a very good speaker on Web Dev and I’m currently missing his podcast which apparently will be back on May 6th. Not a moment too soon if you ask me. At one point Paul apologised to the lady that had been complaining on twitter after he’d got everyone to move up because there was now a “man mountain” blocking their view; the funny thing is that “lady” was me!

So Looking back at Thursday’s Events – here’s my recollection of the basic premise of each presentation:

• Patrick McNeil (Design Meltdown) Finding Inspiration For Design

  Interesting chat from the guy behind Design Meltdown a site I hadn’t eared of before, apparently he’s reviewed >25,000 sites and categorised them. He advocates borrowing inspiration from various different sites to create new ones

• Andy Clarke (Stuff & Nonsense) & Steve Pearce (Poke) User Experience v Brand Experience

  Having seen Andy (Mallarkey) Clarke speak several times, as well as reading his book & winning an iPod Shuffle from him I wasn’t dissapointed. Steve was a good speaker too What was billed as a fight ended (and started to be honest) with consensus: User Experience v Brand Experience are two sides of the same coin

• Andy Budd (Clearleft) Designing the User Experience Curve

  I hadn’t heard Andy talk before, his session is one that really stood out for me uding real world examples of good user experience and applying them to the web, I look forward to seeing the slides so I can refresh my memory.

• Larissa Meek (AgencyNet) Getting your designs approved: 12 Simple Rules

  I really wanted to enjoy this one, but design sign off isn’t something I have to worry about in my current roll. We probably didn’t need the recap at the end.

• Live Photoshop Battle

  Pretty entertaining way to kick off again after lunch, Andy Clarke chatted to Jon Hicks (Hicksdesign) Elliot Jay Stocks (Carsonified) Jina Bolton (Jinabolton.com) & Hannah Donovan (Last.fm) while the madness happened on the big screen. Here’s the end result on Flickr

• Elliot Jay Stocks (Carsonified) Print is the new web

  A good session on drawing inspiration from print medium from the (now ex) Carsonite.

• Jon Hicks (Hicksdesign) From Design to Deployment

  What an excellent way to wrap up the day -Jon Hicks of Firefox logo rendering and perhaps more importantly Rissington Podcast fame talked through the whole process of launching a site “in a day” using the excellent Cheesophile.com as an example. I’m hoping Jon will get chance to turn Cheesophile into a real site – I think I could do with expanding my cheese horizons!

• Paul Farnell (Litmus) Unconventional ways to promote your site

  This was an enjoyable session, but I think I was expecting a bit more radical. I’d hoped he might have touched on things like Facebook apps, he mentioned providing javascript widgets to access data on your site which I guess is a similar idea albeit on a smaller scale.

• Daniel Burka (Digg & Pownce) Evolving the User Experience

  Daniel talked about some of the changes made in various iterations of the design of the digg site, fairly entertaining – but I’m not surprised he didn’t manage the billed 40 minutes

On Friday I attended a couple of the FOWD workshops, it’s late now so I’ll post about them another time.

Overall, I enjoyed FOWD 2008. It wasn’t the best conference I’d been to but then conference organisers have an incredibly difficult job; they’ll never please everyone with every session. I don’t think I’m going to make it to @media this year, but I really hope to be at d.construct in Brighton this September

Tags: conference, Future of Web Design, Events, FOWD2008, FOWD

We’ve started using jQuery quite heavily to power our javascript widgets – without exception everyone who’s used it here has had their own little jQuery epiphany. It’s quite funny to watch, people tend to resist it to start with (particularly the hardcore coders) – but when they use it for a while and see how much pain it can save you they soon come round.

One thing that was missing until now though was a way of getting jQuery intellisense in VS2008. Yesterday I spotted this article by James Hart which describes how this missing functionality can be be added. You need to make sure that you have this Visual Studio 2008 Hotfix installed then follow the instructions in James’ article and as if by magic you’ll have intellisense for your jQuery code! This has gone down a treat here and looks set to make life an awful lot easier.

We’re moving house next Thursday, so last week I phoned Sky to let them know. I booked in installation of Sky TV at our new address and told them that we didn’t want to continue with the sky broadband when we moved.

On Monday My wife phoned me at work to tell me that she couldn’t get on line. When I got home I rebooted the router a couple of times but still couldn’t connect.

Yesterday we got an SMS on our home phone saying “your Sky broadband is now connected, enjoy!” I thought this was a bit odd considering we’ve been connected for the last 15 months or so. I decided to give Sky a call.

It turns out that as soon as you tell them you’re moving house they put in a request to have your broadband disconnected. Apparently this is because it can take 10 -12 days for the request to be actioned. In my case it took about four days.

We were disconnected without warning, it was never mentioned to me that we’d be disconnected before our moving date. I am absolutely furious with sky as we now have no way of accessing the internet at home for the ten days prior to moving home.