Much like the Future of Web Apps Tour I attended back in May, it was time for Glasgow to shine as Carsonified returned once again–this time to share it’s speaker’s wisdoms on design. It was another great conference which I loved thanks to the organisation skills of @loulou200.
The speakers overall were very well picked–with a culmination of local and national speakers that were both really good.
“Hi my name is Doug & I get far too excited about micro formats”–Doug Aitken
The most interesting morning speaker was @drewm who discussed with us the in’s and out’s of Microformats–something that I have personally have been wanting to try out for a while but the microformats wiki, at first glance, makes it seem like a monster waiting to devour you. But… by the end of the morning break… I was coding vcards into a couple of things. Not a problem at all.
I’m sorry to say that the Microsoft Silverlight presentation, as well as the Adobe Air presentation by the Fuzzy Orange guys did little to interest me–but we can’t have it all, can we?
What came after lunch was a real treat–with @patrick_h_lauke of Opera teaching us all about the keyboard navigation and how CSS can actually affect the usability of your website for some users (Presentation available here). Not only that, but @drewm came back to tell us about Cost Effective Web Development (Presentation available here) and our local speaker, @colinhewitt, brought us all a few ideas about his presentation– Design, Release, Iterate: The Importance of Acting on Feedback. Last but not least another Opera guy, @brucel, showed us how HTML 5 is coming along and what we can already use to spice up our own projects. If the amount of laptops open are the sign of how captivated you have your audience, @brucel had us caught up in his web (mind the pun…).
If there was one thing that seemingly disappointed the crowd what that the things that were on offer seemed much more developer oriented than the name suggested. Being a developer, I didn’t mind this too much–but I would have loved to see a little more diversity against it’s counterpart.
It was nice to meet or see once again a lot of like-minded fellows–such as @fitzfrusciante, @gpirie, @dougaitken, @dennisjcoughlin, @sambrown and @mr_nil. I just wish I had the time to meet the rest of you at the after-party!
If you ever have a chance to visit a Carsonified Tour then I definitely recommend it. It’s cheap, it’s informative, and the after-parties are always fun!
p.s. Sam Brown has an excellent write-up of the event as well as creating yet another of his interesting Experience Graphs for you all to enjoy (his has pictures too, so it’s a lot more interesting than mine).
One Response toFOWD Tour Glasgow
Dennis Coughlin said on September 21st, 2009 at 9:10 am
Hey Craig,
Completely agree with all the points in your write-up.
Especially about the lack of design related talks. The developer orientated ones are always helpful, but would really like to see Carsonified focus this tour on Design. At the moment, it feels more like a continuation of their Future of Web Apps conference.
Other than that, it was a great day. See you at the next one!
Cheers
Dennis
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