woowoowoo

This week, I had occasion to play for a few minutes with the latest toy of technolusters – the Apple iTouch. Definitely one of the ‘must haves’ of the decade, obviously, if I lived in a location where the iPhone was available, then I’d probably graduate to lusting after that instead, but for now let’s just say I am smitten.

One of my colleagues at work has a Nokia N95 which has all sorts of fantastic whistles and bells – certainly more bang than the iTouch, and with GPS, the sort of thing I usually get all frothy at the mouth over, but it just doesn’t do it for me. The whole ugly slidy silver box thing is a bit off-putting.

Seems I am not alone. I laughed out loud at the b3ta newsletter this week (not unusual in itself), but this time I wasn’t laughing at the content – it was the subscription links that cracked me up.

iPod Touch: b3ta-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Nokia n810: b3ta-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

In other words, Nokia users, nick off!

With the Australian election underway, we are being bombarded by all the usual political ads, but one particularly puzzles me… The government keep going on about how 70% of the opposition front bench have come from a union background and that this is somehow supposed to be a bad thing.

Well, thanks to wikipedia and a little research, I found that 60% of the government front bench are solicitors and barristers. Is that supposed to make us feel any better?

Certainly not if you have a look around the web for ‘trusted profession’ surveys, where lawyers, insurance brokers, real estate agents and journalists seem to rate in the same 40-50% ‘trust’ strata as unionists. If you add in that Mark Vaile was a real estate agent and Tony Abbot was a journalist, then you’d find that more than 70% of them have belonged to professions with an image problem.

Of course, they’ve all taken a massive downward step since their earlier careers, because politicians are almost always judged the least trusted profession in surveys, only beaten into last place by used car salesmen. Would you buy a used government from this man?

Web Directions South (wds07) is over for another year and I feel a bit like old Juan Antonio Samaranch when I say it was definitely the best one ever!
Everyone was left buzzing with excitement by the closing keynote, Mark Pesce, whose inspirational speech had an effect like a coaches address at half time in today’s AFL grand final. To focus on Mark’s piece though doesn’t do justice to the rest of the stellar line-up and the generous way they gave their knowledge and made themselves available during the breaks and social events. A the other end of the spectrum ,I chatted over breakfast with the charming and quietly spoken Bert Bos – acknowledged as the ‘inventor’ of css. I work with his baby every day and there I am being asked for any ideas that might be incorporated in future versions… pinch me! In between these two remarkable bookends there were at least a half a dozen other brilliant presentations that I hope will make a difference to the way I work: Andy Clarke, Brian Fling, Scott Berkun, Adrian Holovaty, George Oates… the list goes on!

If you missed it, well, that’s a shame, but it doesn’t mean you won’t feel the effects. Most of the presentations will be available on slideshare, presumably tagged with wds07, there will be podcasts available on the Web Directions site. I’m sure there will also be plenty of photos on flickr, blog posts via technorati and loads of other stuff.

the spoiler

Even if you don’t follow up on anything else, I feel have to give the plot away. Each of the three conferences I’ve attended has accurately predicted the web landscape. ’05 was all: ‘here are these wonderful standards and tools finally coming to maturity, get out there and do good stuff with them’. ’06 was: ‘standards is going mainstream, focus, refine and extend’. This year: ‘mobile’. That’s it! when I get back home, I’m going to check my notes and see if the mobile web was even mentioned at 06. This year, I think it occupied at least 30% of the airtime… amazing! I mean, I knew it was coming, but this isn’t a quiet little wedge creeping into the pie chart of our webstats… this is a whole new pie!

So, dear reader, the message is clear. Think standards, think small, move fast or miss out.

First workshop session at WDS07 Andy Clarke’s ‘Transcending CSS’. Not bad either.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by how little CSS I learned. It tells me I’m at least across the stuff, even if I’m not using it fully in the University environment. And that is the nub of Andy’s message. It’s time we started using it. We can’t very well complain about the shortcomings of CSS if we’re not even using the capabilities we have available.

The biggest thing holding us back? IE6 again! I know I avoid css that doesn’t work in IE6, but it’s now and old browser as well as a buggy one. I for one will be trying to adjust my design-to-code process to take advantage of a few more CSS tricks, who cares if IE6 users miss out?