Mind Candy

@media - part of London Web Week took place a few days ago and Steve and myself went along to get our faces talked off about all the latest in web design geekery, discussions on wood textured concrete (seriously, next time you are at the Southbank Centre, check it out, weird) and score a couple of rather nice lunches along the way.

This year saw a brilliant line up of speakers, headed up by Jeffrey Veen (Adaptive Path, Google) first thing Thursday morning chatting about designing your way through data, data visualization and how incorporating users into our practice of user experience - and yes, that is taken directly from the sessions booklet :-). Veen lead the redesign of Google Analytics and managed the web apps UX team.

Tom Cartwright and Clare Roberts took us through the new BBC homepage and spoke about various odds and ends they come across during its development. This project took 3 client side devs and 2 software engineers 3 months and is of course ongoing. One interesting thing they mentioned was that they are currently using JQuery, which is what we use here, but due to JQuery dropping support for Safari 2 they are developing their own library - Glow, so will have to keep an eye on that. They also explained how they got their static image requests more than halved by using CSS Sprites and the Sliding Door techniques - pretty simple stuff really but none the less stuff that I never thought of myself, (apart from simple rollovers) of having 1 big image containing more than a dozen separate images that are simply positioned within the CSS. Simple but very cool. You can check out the beta site here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/.

James Box from Clearleft, Brighton showcased edenbee.com - a new community for people to tackle climate change - nice looking site and up to the usual Clearleft standard.

We also attended a chat about up and coming HTML5 and all that it will offer us from James Graham and Lachlan Hunt, again this was interesting - nothing was mentioned about XHTML2 apart from: HTML5 = Evolution, XHTML2 = Revolution, but I think they will both offer good and bad things. In the end a mixture of the 2 seems a good bet. If you fancy nerding out you can read more about whats in and whats out here: http://xhtml.com/en/future/x-html-5-versus-xhtml-2/. I am going to look more into HTML5 over the next while and thanks to Opera - which I think leads in support, try a few things out!

Dan Rubin of Sidebar Creative fame took us through some design techniques - some may argue this was pretty much Photoshop 101 but it can never be a bad thing to brush up on skills. Seeing more designing with grids was also good.

Andy Clarke took it a step further with his chat “Underpants Over My Trousers” - I love hearing Andy’s talks and this was another awesome session. In this session we learnt how Andy applied his passion for comics to almost everything as well as with his design for a Puerto Rican newspaper of all things.

John Resig, author of the JQuery Javascript library gave us the run down on all the different libraries out there at the moment and features they each offer.

The first day panel was good, discussing things from design workflow, scrums and sprints and how designers fit into this space along with current trends in web design.

Overall the event this year surpassed expectations and I took a lot away from it. I’m looking forward to next year - but maybe not as many drinks on the Thursday evening ;-)

@media Flickr pool.

We’ve been a bit slow writing up our trip to the recent Mashup* event on Widgets. Possibly because we’ve been very busy working on what we were demoing - your monster, sitting on your Facebook/Bebo/MySpace page greeting your friends in a monstery way.

The event was really fascinating in many ways. The widgiverse as I now know it’s called seems to be like the web in it’s earliest form. Everyone wants to be there, lots of people have no idea why they want to be there - but are just doing stuff in a flag planting exercise - and a whole load of people are asking about the money.There are definitely some very smart ideas though, and this time round there are better and richer statistics about useage and true demographics.

There was a great talk from Ankur Shah from Techlightenment about the current state of play and the importance of the social graph in understanding the use of your widget and on making the widget more compelling and integrated for users. It was also great to see Ivan Pope expounding on his vision for where widgets are going and about the decentralisation of data. As someone who has to constantly think about storing vast amounts of data and scalability, I personally love the idea that your data is held in little connected pools in different locations and is then mashed up as you want it through the tools and widgets you choose. The experience of the mashup event, when taken in conjunction with the recent O’Reilly report on Facebook apps, gives you a lot of insights into how, what and why users want from widgets. 

Our main reason for being at Mashup and being there mob handed (Jack, Jey, Mike, Divinia and I) was to show off the prototype of our little monster widget. The widget’s now on our community page and is also available for you to add on Facebook and Bebo, with MySpace not far behind. It’s in its infancy and we’re working on much more integration with the social networking sites and soon we’ll hopefully be doing some fun bidirectional stuff soon. Let us know as always what you think of the widget, we’ve got some ideas but it’d be great to hear yours.

For anyone interested in the widgiverse, it looks like Ivan’s WidgetWebExpo will be a pretty cool gathering out in New York in June.

The Mind Candies were out in force on the 1st April, with a group of us attending “Future Karaoke“, an evening of short talks on art, music, philosophy and technology.

Amongst the various presenters, three Mind Candies took the stage to present their own short talks on a variety of topics.

James led us down the tech avenue with his talk on the infamous Halting Problem, resulting in a mini debate between members of the audience regarding quantum computing and the P=NP Problem.

Next up was Alastair with his talk entitled “Sonarboria: A Walk Through the Forest of Generative Music”, which delved into the realm of algorithmic composition of music, and included an impressive live demonstration of the techniques.

Dr. Mike continued the generative music theme with his talk entitled “The Generation Game” which also touched on the philosophical side of automatic composition, sparking a discussion on whether computers will ever truly be capable of injecting “feeling” into music.

With a variety of other talks including poetry, glitch aesthetics, synthesisers, APIs, and game design the evening proved to be a real success, ending with the first UK gig of The Tenorions, the first Tenori-On band in the world.

A quick post to say that I will be speaking on women in the gaming industry at “Games For Girls” on Wednesday the 26th March from 6pm. “Games For Girls” is being held at the venue below:

Wellcome Collection
183 Euston Road
London, England NW1 2BE
United Kingdom
+44 20 7611 2222

It should be an interesting event with other speakers from Pixel-lab, Nik Nak Games and Harbottle & Lewis. Drop the organisers a line if you would like to go along!