Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

That was @media 2006 | 4 Comments

Posted in Events on 17th June 2006, 10:12 am by

@media2006 logo

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.

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  • http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk Malarkey

    Many thanks for your kind words. I’m very pleased that you enjoyed my presentation.

    Many kind regards,

    Andy

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Andy: You’re welcome, your presentation was one of the few that was really about something new in terms ideas, and that’s what made it so enjoyable.

  • Cecil Ward

    The wireless LAN being on the fritz all the time hindered Robin Christopherson’s talk, which was unforgivable on the part of the conference centre people. Enjoyed his talk nonetheless, and at least he got plenty of questions.

    I myself had problems with the wireless LAN, and although I didn’t take the time to properly dig into what was going on, I thought I glimpsed it was failing to hand out IP addresses. I seemed to get the impression that the LAN was pretty much ok first thing in the morning but bad later on in the day. Speculating, that would be consistent with a setup where the DHCP server on the LAN was not able to hand out enough IP addresses for such a huge number of simultaneous geeks all armed with laptops, and would normally be fine if there were not so many users around simultaneously. If the QEII conference centre people only have

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Cecil, somehow your comment got cut-off please carry on.

    Regarding the Wi-fi. I did find a way to get onto the wifi on the second day by going directly to the access point’s login page which were on varying ip addresses. Hence I was able to upload my notes pretty much directly after each presentation.

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