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18.04.07 Originally uploaded by Hubmedia.I think the last time I came to the Big Smoke on the train was for the future of web design, or web apps last year. I was initially skeptical that they had tried to squeeze in so many speakers giving some only 20 minutes. However the conference was definitely improved. Which is just as well as since I last came South West Trains have resorted to day light robbery to keep in the black. Here is a transcript of my paying for my ticket on the train from Bitterne (Near Southampton Central) with interpretation in italics:

Guard: Ticket please. Your money or your life?

Me: Can I have a return to Waterloo. Take my money!

Guard: Do you need to use the tube? Speed it up, your jewelry too.

Me: Yes. Okay.

Guard: That’s £58.60. That’s £58.60.

Me: – At this point I hand over my card – I hope some kindly person will look on me in my destitution and lend me 20p for the phone.

Guard: Thank you. If I see you again i’ll kill you.

Me: Thanks. You won’t see me again.

Griping over and back to the conference, the shorter time slots allowed speakers who perhaps weren’t so used to doing presentations to say what they wanted to say really well. For example Denise Wilton from Moo spoke for 15 or 20 minutes on the personality or persona of online apps and that was excellent. It didn’t need to be longer, it was great as it was.

Most importantly the sponsoring and freebies were greatly improved. Microsoft had a setup a lounge with lots of bean bags, x boxes, chairs, free water etc and were giving away copies of Expression, the new DreamWeaver esque web development tool. It was gratifying to see the Microsoft Expression lounge chock full of MacBook Pros and MacBooks. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a mac version of Expression.

The highlight speakers for me were Andy Clarke (Stuff and Nonsense) talking on designing for developers. Basically he explored, among other things, if comping every page in photoshop to show to the client then producing HTML is the most sensible way of working. The client can’t see, for example, what resizing text looks like in photoshop, the developer doesn’t necessarily see the intentions of interactions from a PSD unless lots of other diagrams are produced. He advocated prototyping in HTML and showing that to customers as well as being a better way for designers, develpers and others to talk about all aspects of the site as it’s in the final medium.

Rei Inamoto (AKQA) talked about on Branding and Identity. He just made five points about branding for yourself or your customers.

Finally right at the end Steve Pearce (Poke) did a talk entitled “15 things in 15 minutes” Lots of cool stuff I hadn’t seen before along with lots of stuff about being responsible in terms of environment and welfare of others which I like. Does anyone have a list of the sites he mentioned, i’ve lost some.

During the day I bumped into Mark Wubben, or rather he bumped into me and introduced himself. I had no idea who he was and I took his card. I was just thinking – novemberborn.. novemberborn… flip, that’s the developer of sIFR! So I texted him right away and asked him if I could get him lunch. Which I did, although there were some more of us around so I got to chat to some other people more than Mark really. No problem, all good.

All in all I had an enjoyable long and tiring day, thumbs up to Carson Systems for improving the conference so much since last year. Thumbs down to South West Trains for charging £51.40 for a standard day return to London.