May 2010 Archives

I recently spent a couple of days at Future of Web Design in London. Beforehand I downloaded the iPhone app, which put the conference programme straight into my pocket, and allowed me to share which sessions I was planning to attend. It was, though, missing one key feature.

At 'Future of web design' in London, Brad Haynes gave a session on tips for wireframing, and Sarah Parmenter delivered an excellent set of 10 tips for iPhone application design. Here are my notes from the sessions.

In a second set of notes from the recent 'Future of web design' conference I attended in London, I'm looking specifically at CSS3, and the talks given by Dan Cederholm and Molly E. Holzschlag.

I couldn't be at the presentation of the hacks generated by The Guardian's Open Platform commercial launch. And even if I had been, I can't code. So here is the 90 second video I sent down to London from Birmingham, featuring an outline of the ideas I sketched for commercial use of The Guardian's API.

In the first of a series of posts writing up my notes from this year's "Future of web design" conference in London, here is what I made of the keynote by Brendan Dawes.

The Times and The Independent have both made a move to only allowing people to post comments on their site using their real life identities. The theory is that it will drive up the quality of debate. In practice, I do wonder whether they will instead miss out some powerful contributions by users who rely on anonymity in order to be able to tell their stories.

I had a very relaxed an analogue time at #jeecamp, and so instead of writing up an extensive set of notes and blogposts, I did a sketch about the day instead. Here it is.

Last week The Guardian launched the commercial version of the Open Platform - a content API that allows people to build revenue generating apps using Guardian content. To celebrate, a mini-hack day style developer challenge took place in London, which I tried to join in whilst attending #jeecamp in Birmingham.

Google are offering two free places for female computer scientists at this year's EuroIA Summit in Paris. Here are details of how to apply.

With a wider range of semantic tags available in HTML5, will information architects find themselves specifying which sorts of mark-up they expect to see applied to each area of the page?

My family had a dreadful 'customer' experience at the hands of abusive National Express East Anglia staff at Liverpool Street station on Sunday morning. However, a member of London Underground staff came to our rescue. In seeking to find out how to thank them, I discovered that TfL have a form to do that on their website.

In the last of my notes from #dendatameet, I've written up what I took away from a great talk given by Olga Pierce and Jeff Larson of ProPublica over video link. They discussed why you should avoid having "walled gardens" between your journalists and your developers, and between your content and your flashy interactive widgets.

In my second blogpost about last week's #dendatameet in Manchester, here are my notes from the talks by Julian Tait and Paul bradshaw. I've also included a video clip of Max Gadney, whose "Information isn't beautiful" theory I mentioned in my own talk.

At #dendatameet this week, Oscar Westlund gave a presentation about news consumption on mobile phones. Here are some of my notes from his talk.

In the last part of this series looking at example of how you can use spreadsheet formulas to help you mark up small chunks of HTML, I'm introducing the IF statement formula, which enables your spreadsheet to make automatic decisions based on the information you give it.

The call for papers for this year's EuroIA Summit in Paris ends at the weekend. If you need some inspiration for your submission, here is a run-through of some of my notes from the 2008 event in Amsterdam.

In my second blog post looking at using spreadsheets to help you mark up HTML, I look at how recognising patterns could show you the way to some time-saving shortcuts.

Often you can take shortcuts when using computers by simply having a bit of programming know-how and access to a spreadsheet. In this example, I show how you can save time entering lists of links into a CMS system with a formula to mark-up some basic HTML.

The debate about whether journalists need to be able to program has flared up again. My view is that it isn't necessary to write code, but that learning to think like a programmer will bring you lots of advantages when wrestling with getting the best out of online publishing systems.

News organisations have spent a lot of money on flashy election maps, graphics and interactives over the last few days, but I think it is two simple pie charts that illustrate what is wrong with our first past the post election system.

My recent blog post about changes to the BBC's global navigation scheme has generated some interesting comments from people involved in various stages of the website's design throughout the noughties.

I've been keeping a close eye on the new media elements of this campaign, and thought I'd stick my neck out and predict three digital trends we will see a lot more of next time around.

Whilst some traditional broadcasters will be applying the standard polling day rules to their social media activities tomorrow, newspapers and political parties will enjoy a much freer hand.

In the coming weeks and months I'll be talking at or attending #DENDATAMEET, Future of Web Design London, JEEcamp and the EuroIA summit in Paris. Find out more about the events and how to join me here.

During the course of the election campaign I've been making a gallery of screenshots of online news coverage, with a particular focus on the design of interactive tools and maps. I've put them together into a Flickr set, and made a short video compilation of them.

Content from two events I've recently been involved in has just been published on the net. You can watch video of the "Content Strategy Manhattan style" evening, or listen to an interview featuring me from the EUSci podcast, recorded when I was speaking at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.