Web Directions Podcast

After a lost decade in the wilderness, JavaScript is starting to change and evolve. We’ll look at CoffeeScript, a little language that compiles into JavaScript, providing concise ways to to write many common JavaScript patterns. We’ll cover syntactic and semantic pain points, polyfills, sugar, and how you can start experimenting with your own flavor of JS. Jeremy Ashkenas is part of the Interactive News team at the New York Times, as well as the lead developer of DocumentCloud, helping news organizations analyze and publish the primary source documents behind the news. He works on CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docco, Jammit, and Ruby-Processing, among other opensource projects. Follow Jeremy on Twitter: @jashkenas Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Yes, business applications can be made fun and gamelike. No, points, levels and badges are not the way to create sustained interest. While many sites have added superficial gaming elements to make interactions more engaging, the companies that "get it" have a better understanding of the psychology behind motivation. They know how to design sites that keep people coming back again and again. So what are the secrets? What actually motivates people online? How do you create sustained interest in your product or service? Speaker Stephen P. Anderson will share common patterns from game design, learning theories, and neuroscience to reveal what motivates-and demotivates-people over the long haul. Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He recently published the Mental Notes card deck to help product teams apply psychology to interaction design. Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops to help businesses design fun, playfu

The work we’re collectively doing-opening up gradually all of human information and media, making it recombinable, helping people create and share their work-is a huge unspoken, sexy, world-​​​​redefining mission. It’s a mission that many of us have become blasé about, almost unaware of. It’s a project so large that it’s hard to get a grasp on. And the next few years are going to get even more interesting as the network pervades physical objects and environments, sensing and manifesting information in the real world. It’s time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity-even the planet itself-is our canvas. Tom Coates is a technologist and writer who focuses on new product development, the web of data, location services and social software . He’s worked for many of the web’s leading companies, including Time Out, the BBC-where he ran a small R&D team focused on

We first got server side JavaScript in 1996. This time, we’re going to get it right. Douglas Crockford is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, best known for his ongoing involvement in the development of the JavaScript language, and for having popularized the data format JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). He is currently a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo!, and is also a writer and speaker on JavaScript, JSON, and related web technologies. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Modern JavaScript development often has to address a number of different concerns ranging from the use of architectural patterns such as MVC to improve code organisation, through to JavaScript templating, cross-​​​​browser storage, routing/​​bookmarking, script loading, feature detection and more. In this talk, JavaScript developer and jQuery Core Bug Triage & Docs team member Addy Osmani discusses tools that can simplify your development process significantly. Addy Osmani is a popular JavaScript Blogger and a senior independent developer based in London, England. He is also a member of the jQuery Bug Triage and Front-​​​​end teams where he assists with community updates, releases and bugs. Addy’s passion lies in helping spread knowledge about JavaScript and jQuery best practices, coding techniques and open-​​​​source projects in the community. He achieves this through numerous free online talks, articles and resources which he releases each month. For more on Addy’s work, check out his official website A

Throughout the years, the Swiss Army Knife has been the trusted companion of scouts and explorers alike, and for front-​​end developers, CSS has been a trusty, if sometimes frustrating, companion. And just as blades, scissors and sundry tools have been added to the Swiss Army Knife, with CSS3, we have new tools and implements of creativity, and some tried and true tools have been honed and sharpened. Of course the key to success is knowing which of the many tools to use and how to wield them in a given situation. Join Stephanie Rewis as she explores some shiny enhancements to favorite old tools like backgrounds and borders, as well as slices and dices with new tools like CSS masks and more! Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis is the founder of W3Conversion, a web design company with a passion for web standards. A front-​​end developer, Stephanie created the CSS Starter Layouts in Dreamweaver CS3 and recently updated for DW CS5. Her passion for sharing knowledge has led her to write books and tutorials, pen a bi-​​m

With most browsers adding increasing support, and the simplicity of providing fallbacks for those that don’t, CSS3 gradients are something we can start to use right now. They benefit our users with faster websites and ourselves with more time in our hands to spend in other things, since they are easy to create, edit and update. A very powerful feature that can also be utilized for a surprising number of design effects, even ones that don’t resemble gradients at all. In this talk, Lea will explore CSS3 gradients in great depth and it’s almost guaranteed that no matter your expertise level, you will walk out having learned new things. Lea Verou is a front-​​end engineer currently living in Greece. She discovered programming at the young age of 12 (web development a few years after) and it was love at first ...line. In 2008, she co-​​founded Fresset Ltd, whose websites have attracted a large following in the Greek internet scene, they are currently working frantically on their first international project. Fe

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is estimated to produce 15 petabytes of data per year. This is difficult to store let alone understand! With connected devices quickly out numbering connected people, we are soon going to be swamped with data. Visualising the constant stream of information we are collecting so that it can be better understood is going to be a critical task. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through a quick overview of some basic chart and graph design, then look at how easy it is to write some quick scripts in your favourite language to produce beautiful graphics. SVG is an under-​​​​rated technology, but it can be created programmatically and quickly to visualise data. Brian Suda is an informatician residing in Reykjavík, Iceland. He has spent a good portion of each day connected to Internet after discovering it back in the mid-​​1990s. Most recently, he has written a book on the topic of charts and graphs entitled Designing with Data. His own little patch of Internet can be found at su

There’s little hotter in the world of web development right now than creating optimized web experiences and applications for mobile web enabled devices like iPhone, Android, iPad and webOS. Luckily, there’s a number of excellent HTML/​​CSS/​​Javascript frameworks to help developers create native-​​​​like experiences for these devices. In this session, Jonathan Stark takes an in depth look at several of these, including JQTouch, JQuery Mobile and SenchaTouch, comparing and contrasting their approaches, and most appropriate uses. As a developer looking to tailor experiences and applications for the mobile web, this will be an invaluable session. Jonathan Stark is a mobile and web application consultant who the Wall Street Journal has called an expert on publishing desktop data to the web. He is the author of O’Reilly’s Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is a tech editor for both php|architect and Advisor magazines, and is often quoted in the media on internet and mobile lifestyle trends.

With HTML5, we can now cache our applications and the data that goes with them. This means our favourite programming platform can now be used to build apps that work offline, survive intermittent downtimes, and gain in performance from cached content. In this session we’ll get hands-​​​​on with the application cache to make the app run when it’s not online. We’ll check out the techniques for client-​​​​side persistence: web storage and indexed database. Finally, we’ll look at the latest techniques for file access - reading and writing files on the user’s hard drive from a web app is being defined by web standards and implemented in today’s modern browsers. Michael Mahemoff is a Chrome Developer Advocate for Google, based in London, always looking at ways to make the web a more habitable place for users and developers alike. He’s been programming on the web since the mid ’90s, in a range of public-​​​​facing and enterprise (Java, what else?) contexts, and is the author of Ajax Design Patterns (O’Reilly, 200

A much-​​​​​​hyped feature of HTML5 is native multimedia. In this session we’ll look at embedding. We’ll look at the pros and the cons of HTML5 multimedia and see how to write simple controls with JavaScript. Most excitingly, we’ll also look at how HTML5 builds in support for subtitles and captions for multimedia accessibility. And you might pick up a Turkish dancing tip on the way. Bruce evangelises Open Web Standards for Opera. He’s currently working with the British Standards Institution to draft the new Standard for commissioning accessible web sites and writing a book about HTML5. Previously, he’s been front-​​​​end technical lead for the Law Society and Solicitors Regulation Authority web sites, tutor to a princess’ daughter in Thailand, a movie extra in Bombay, and a tarot card reader in Istanbul. He blogs at brucelawson​.co​.uk, drinks Guinness and is training for a blue belt in kickboxing. Follow Bruce on Twitter: @brucel Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativ

Innovation is intensifying off the browser - the things we use everyday are increasingly controlled by touch, gesture and voice. And we, as interaction designers, are faced with a challenge that’s the opposite of our browser-​​​​based one-​​​​man-​​​​shop: there’s suddenly a gulf of production between our concept and the final product; the means of production is as tricky to navigate as a roster of Tolstoy characters; mistakes are expensive; and everyone speaks a different language. Sound dangerous? Sound exciting? Donovan argues the processes for the future lie in our more material-​​​​based graphic designer pasts, and our cousin disciplines of industrial design and architecture. After a decade of honing our newfangled browser-​​​​based skills, learn how to dust off and sharpen the tools of our roots. Hannah Donovan is a Canadian interaction designer living in London. She led design at Last​.fm for five years, and before that worked agency-​​​​side designing digital campaigns. Since leaving Last​.fm this

In 1960, Milton Bradley published "The Game of Life": a capitalist wet dream of a board game, won by the lucky one who retired richest. Today, "gamification" vendors still take Milton Bradley seriously. From losing weight to saving Africa, from watching TV to matching DNA sequences: there’s nothing that couldn’t be made more fun by adding points, badges, and other elements from video games. At least that’s the selling proposition. Yet the debate on gamification is deeply split. On the one hand, marketers dream of customer mind control, on the other game designers warn of digital snake oil sellers and shallow ‘pointsification’. How to design a playful experience that is truly meaningful to users - instead of just creating shallow novelty effects? Which lessons do games really hold for other products and services? What criticism is valid? And how can designers interested in "gameifying" an application steer clear of the worst pitfalls? Sebastian Deterding is a designer and researcher usually flown in for so

That user who just signed up is about to bail. And a thousand other people just stopped in but didn’t even bother to register. Your product is great, but your users don’t stay long enough to find that out. The first fifteen minutes of your product are the most important and they’re so often squandered. But! We’re starting to figure out what works and what does not. There’s no longer any excuse to give your visitors a poor initial experience. Learn how great user interfaces entice people right out of the gate, then help newcomers get people over the threshold. Then! Great interfaces delightfully provide new users to learn complex systems and become engaged, passionate contributors. Onwards and upwards, friends. Daniel is a user interface designer based in San Francisco by way of Canada. He was the creative director at Digg for several years, he was a co-​​​​founder of a startup called Pownce, he continues as an inactive partner at the design firm silverorange, and he’s designing the UI for a game called Gli

Developers have long been able to use an array of debugging, profiling and other testing tools to ensure application quality and performance. More recently, web developers have started to rely on increasingly sophisticated tools to help test their web sites and applications. But particularly in the mobile space, when developing sophisticated applications with web technologies, testing presents significant challenges. Ross Boucher, one of the developers of Objective-​​J, the Cappuccino web application framework, the visual development tool Atlas, and 280 slides knows a thing or two about testing sophisticated applications developed using web technologies. In this session, he’ll share some of those secretes, and help you better test and debug your applications. Ross Boucher is co-​​founder of 280 North, the organization behind 280 slides and the popular Cappuccino and Atlas frameworks. At 280 North, he splits his time between server and client-​​side code, including the text system in 280 Slides. He has a M

There’s an old expression, that there are only 2 hard problems in computing: naming, cache invalidation and off-​​by-​​one errors. Building offline web apps is all about those hard problems. There are some different ways of storing stuff - such as html5 caching, html5 storage, sqllite, and even native stores such as contacts and calendars - and we’ll sing their praises. But the really hard problems are knowing what to store, whether the stuff is still good or needs refreshing, how much to store, how to resolve conflicts between the client and server, how to integrate with data-​​specific stores, all in a bewildering cacophony of network and storage limited devices. We’ll spend the bulk of our time on these hard problems, which is probably more useful than api description and sample code. Dave Orchard is Mobile Architect at Salesforce​.com and located in Vancouver, Canada. This means being involved in many mobile platforms, architectures, tools, technologies and APIs. Prior to that, he was a co-​​founder o

Dear app makers, I love the stuff you have been putting out recently. Supercool maps, guides, syncing and such make my day. There’s just one little thing. As a content strategist and writer, I’ve noticed that some of your instructions aren’t as clear as they could be. The experience is not as fulfilling as it might be. I know this might not be your favourite part of the process. In fact, they are probably the bits chucked in to get it out the door. And so I have created a session to help ease the pain. I have a framework for you to build on to make sure that your next app is as pithy as it is pretty and elegant to use as it is coded. I’ll even bring a whole virtual suitcase of apps with fantastic snippets of microcopy to inspire you. It’s a pretty simple concept and it’s a bunch of fun to work on, running alongside your app development. In one sentence: it’s about creating a fulfilling experience, one that puts you ahead of your competition, simply through the power of the written word. Relly Annett-​​B

This keynote will focus on the unique potential offered to web developers - the ability to use the web platform to build compelling applications that reach across different devices, scenarios and environments. In discussing the approaches necessary to deliver great experiences across all these spaces, we will also uncover unique opportunities in a platform that reaches from mobile phones to the biggest display screen in your house. Chris Wilson is a Developer Advocate at Google Inc. He began working on web browsers in 1993 when he co-​​authored the original Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, the first mass-​​market WWW browser. After leaving NCSA in 1994 and spending a year working on the AIRMosaic web browser for SPRY, Inc., he joined Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team as a developer in 1995. Over the course of 15 years, Chris represented Microsoft in many standards working groups, in particular helping develop standards for Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, the Document Object Model and XSL through the W3C work

You’ve seen a lot of demos, but is HTML5 really ready for primetime? We made an HTML5-​​based pool game with the explicit goal of creating an experience that defies your expectations for what a browser can do. In this session we’ll take you through the challenges and triumphs of working with this new technology. For the experienced HTML5 dev, we’ll share tips and tricks. For the rest of us, it will be a great primer on the exciting potential that HTML5 brings to the web. Robby Ingebretsen is a user experience designer and developer with a singular purpose: making great ideas real. As the founder of Pixel Lab, a user experience consultancy that specializes in Silverlight, HTML5 and mobile technologies, he helps clients make cool stuff - the kind that needs the unique full-​​bodied blend of a little design love and a little engineering kung-​​fu. Follow Robby on Twitter: @ingebretsen Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Most user experience research takes place sitting behind a computer. And yet these days, most networked experiences are happening on mobile devices. Some common user experience research methods work well in a mobile environment - others don’t. In this talk, Juliette Melton will guide you through how to use some great existing research methods in a mobile context, how to incorporate some new (and fun!) methods into your arsenal, and propose next generation tools and services to make mobile user experience research even better. Juliette has ten years of experience building, managing, and researching digital environments and is a human factors researcher based at IDEO in San Francisco. She’s deeply interested in the intersections between digital culture, learning, and communication. Her work has spanned a broad range of industries including social media, casual gaming, education administration, electronic publishing, corporate banking, computer hardware, and public health. Community education - through worksh