So @media for me at least is over now. It's been an excellent couple of days and has certainly surpassed last years event. The venue was really spacious, and less packed as a result and everything was really smoothly executed from the catering to the audio visual for the presentations. The only complaint I have is that the wifi was very intermittant and difficult to use and that would be the one thing I would hope could be improved for next year.
The talks that really stood out for me were; Molly's talk on internationalisation, Nate Kochley's presentation on Y! vs Y! and Andy Clarke's Transcending CSS. That's not to say that the other's weren't any good! All of the presentations were of a very high standard and though I am not that into the panel format, the hot topics panel was particularly entertaining thanks to Jeremy's moderation and the interaction with the panelists which is everything a good panel should be (in my humble opinion).
Molly's talk on internationalisation was really great as she went into plenty of detail on why internationalisation is much more than just a translation of the site's content. It was a real eye opener and anyone looking to seriously create a truely international site needs to pay attention to all of these details. (View my notes on Moly's presentation here)
Nate Koechley's presentation took us through some in depth details of what has gone into three of Yahoo's products, the new Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail Beta and Yahoo Photos Beta, Nate covered some really interesting concepts that Yahoo! are working with. Of particular interest was using Event Delegation in JavaScript. Event delegation is a layer that intercepts user actions and subsequently set-up the event for the right object to prevent a browser from being overloaded by too many events attached to too many objects. (view my notes on Nate's talk here)
Andy Clarke's presentation followed on very well from Nate's through talking about the concept of progressive enhancement whereby we should support the capabilities of each browser rather than attempting to create a common experience for each user agent. He also challenged us all to think differently about where we get our ideas from and to not necessarily use the web as a source of inspiration. There's going to be a book on this too in the autumn so it's going to be well worth keeping an eye out for. (View my notes on Andy's presentation here)
The evening events were excellent and it was great to meet-up with old friends as well as meet plenty of new faces.
So thanks to Patrick, Dan and Amanda for organising a top-notch event. I look forward to next year's @media.