Sessions

The Web is an artefact of the present; the here and now. We publish online every day but how much of what we publish will be saved for posterity? And does it even matter? Does a culture of the here-and-now deserve preserving?

These questions, and many others, won't be answered during the opening talk of the inaugural head conference.

What does the internet as a social network mean? A look at social network portability and long term views on identity.

Making your content mobile ready goes a long way to making it accessible to people with disabilities and vice versa. In this presentation I'll introduce common barriers that mobile and disabled users face, shared solutions, tools to help you debug pages for both desktop and mobile browsing. We'll also look at who's browsing what and the business case for accessible mobile content.

Aral will be hosting the London hub.

Keeping your web application secure is an ongoing process - new classes of vulnerabilities are discovered with surprising frequency, and if you don't keep on top of them you could be in for a nasty surprise. This talk will discuss both common and obscure vulnerabilities, with real-world examples of attacks that have worked against high profile sites in the past.

Accessibility doesn't have to be boring, ugly, painful to implement and harm the user experience for those who don't have a disability (although all too often, it winds up being at least at least one of the above).

Find out how to make accessibility sexy (for everyone) with these practical hints and tips.

By now, many of us who work on the Web know what web standards mean, what benefits best web practices ought to reap if we do everything just right. But in the reality of the production environment, come crunch time — standards go out the window, corners get cut, hacks worm their way in. To make it more complicated, web teams typically comprise people of differing backgrounds and ability. How much can good production planning help to balance the left-and-right brains of the web building process? Just how do we go about managing a team so that we get the best quality outcome possible?

In this session, we will discuss practical ideas and explore methods on how to get a team to work well together towards creating a quality web product.

In this session I will explain what kind of barriers we are facing when it comes to teaching and understanding JavaScript as a technology for the web. I've been constantly confused by how hard we make it for ourselves when it comes to making people use our scripts and APIs. We don't have to make the same mistakes we did in the past, yet there seems to be a drive to do so.

How smart devices, climate change and the financial crisis are changing the landscape of sustainability.

This session looks at some of the main themes behind web 2.0, commoditisation, innovation, cloud computing and enterprise 2.0. It proposes that a common pattern exists behind them all, and that the “open” meme is a significant driving force behind these changes.

Organizations love their hierarchy, but it quite often hinders their progress as well as the progress of the members or participants in their organization. The walled gardens create barriers to creation and sharing, which has great value. But, walls do have value for many who need smaller groups of known participants to build a sense of comfort. These walls need to be permeable and leak, at a minimum to let the understandings find those who need it (as well as the converse).

We know walled gardens do not provide the best value for society and organizations, but we also know many people work best in small groups in familiar comfortable surroundings. This talk will build a path that examines both sides of the wall and how to use the comfortable surroundings to aid those who need it while creating openings to let the created value through and out.

The attention economy was talked about at the end of 06 to death. Through all the hype, a couple of guys from down-under started to make sense of attention and proposed APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language).Unfortunately little is known about APML and there is a lot of mis-information on APML

While many feel that the problem of data synchronization for mobility has already been solved (many times), it is clear that we live in a world of many fragmented solutions for synchronization, and often times pay for client technology to synchronize data. Oracle has proposed a solution, called AtomDB, for uniform data synchronization designed for the Web using existing open standards such as Atom and HTTP. This solution addresses the network unreliability problem mainly in the context of Web browsers. AtomDB is a transparent, local, read-write cache for application data that is synchronized with data sources using the same application interfaces used by AJAX applications to access their data. There are many difficult challenges for a mobile developer to solve that are unavoidable -- ensuring data availability so that an application can find it easily when it needs it should not be another burden.

Explore some of the seemingly minor features like command line execution and class introspection to unlock AIR's unique ability to work with flash and flex in fun and helpful ways. These features and some example tools like server-side air, localization, and metrics tracking.

I'll be somewhere between Washington D.C and Toronto. Hooray for the Internet!

Session description forthcoming, but expect plasticine.

Take your Flash and Flex applications to the next level.

Add streaming video, live interactivity and push technology to your projects, all using the acclaimed open source Red5 Flash server.

Project leader Chris Allen will walk attendees though building a Red5 application using the new Red5 plugin for Eclipse and Jedai Framework (http://jedai.googlecode.com).

They will learn how to harness the power of RTMP in Flash to build cutting edge content including multi-user games, live video chat and more.

This session will focus on the techniques, workflow and planning necessary to overcome the creative and technical challenges when creating interactive experiences in Papervision3D.

Carlos will present the latest project of carlosulloa.com, a truly innovative research and development programme, giving an inside view of the entire creation process, from concept and planning, to development and art production.

We'll cover some lesser known techniques and "gotcha's" with Papervision3D and the Flash player in general.

Take a guided tour through noted landmarks of ActionScript 3, the scripting language of the Flash Platform, including Flash CS4, Flash CS3, Flex, and AIR. Using sound visualization techniques, Rich will describe the event model, display list, sound infrastructure, and more. The session will begin with the most basic timeline script, introduce the Document Class, and end up as a simple multi-class OOP project--all before the session is over.

Finally! Realtime 3D in Flash is taking off! All thanks to the work of the Papervision3D team, there has never been more demand for 3D games, apps and websites. And naturally, with such a powerful library comes somewhat of a steep learning curve. But never fear! One of the Papervision3D development team, and Plug-in Media's CTO Seb Lee-Delisle is here to show you how to get started with the minimum of fuss, stress and bother. In this session he'll show you how to create 3D objects in code, import them from other 3D apps and even make a simple game. Full source code will be provided and can be downloaded in advance from sebleedelisle.com

KitchenSync is an open-source library for sequencing all types of events. Designed for developers who want a smart way to handle tweening animations. Written from the ground up in ActionScript 3.0, KitchenSync relies on smart object-oriented architecture rather than complicated shorthand. KitchenSync makes extensive use of events and informative runtime errors and is quite flexible when it comes to extending the functionality.

KitchenSync is more than an animation library. Tweens are a major part of KitchenSync but that is not the end. It also allows you to sequence sounds, functions, and event dispatches among other actions. The framework is open-ended allowing you to come up with new ways to work with its virtual timeline.

KitchenSync is the official sequencing engine of the GAE SWF Project which was used to create the <head> Conference site.

This session will introduce the basics of the KitchenSync library and show examples of how it can be used to sequence animations and other events. Features that set it apart from other tweening engines will also be highlighted. A Q&A session with the lead architect will follow.

The ability to manipulate pixels with Actionscript has been around since Flash Player 8 so one might be inclined to think that after all those years there are no more white spots left on the Bitmap and no new discoveries to me made.

Far from it! Mario Klingemann will take you into the the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the BitmapData class and reveal the secret beauty of some unregarded methods that many might have overlooked in the first rush.

Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective approach to object-oriented programming. Python’s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most platforms.

This session will show you how Python can extend your Flash applications, and how the Flash Platform is the ideal candidate to add graphical user interface to your Python applications.

In this session you can expect code examples and tips that show how easy it is to combine these runtimes to create killer applications.

Web Services are a pretty hot topic right now. There are a number of ways to make a web service, but the one that has worked for services like Flickr and Delicious is to use the REST architecture. Learn how using the design ideas from REST can improve your Web Service in a number of critical ways.

Development platforms and languages shift in and out of vogue like the proverbial sands of time. Every new technology offers some great new features and a lot of variations on old ones. And though it usually means locking ourselves in a technology silo, when it comes time to build, we choose the one that makes the most sense at the time and begin building.

But the cutting edge language tools you use today may be 'so last millennium' tomorrow. And with the spread of Internet connectivity to every conceivable corner of our lives, one platform or technology may not be enough to get the job done today! To reach beyond the browser or desktop and capture a sizable fraction of the fractured mobile market, several completely different languages may need to be used, and new ones adopted as they come into favor.

So, the question developers and project managers should be asking themselves is how can we write software that anticipates its own inevitable migration, and at the same time embrace new technologies along the way to extend our software's use cases?

PureMVC is a design pattern-based framework that was originally written in AS3 for Adobe Flex, Flash and AIR. It has since been ported to a number of other languages/platforms including: AS2/(FlashLite, Flex 1.5), ColdFusion, C#/(.NET, Windows Mobile, SilverLight), haXe/(JavaScript/Neko/Flash), Java(J2ME/EE/SE/FX), PHP and Python(Google App Engine, wxPython). The PureMVC Project Architect will discuss the secrets to PureMVC's portability, and how you can use it to use it to write more 'future-proof' applications.

App Engine enables developers to build massively scalable web applications on Google's hardware and software infrastructure. During this talk, we'll explain what App Engine is and how it uses Bigtable and other Google technologies to make launching and scaling web apps easy.

The web hooks pattern is a simple and pragmatic solution that will change the dynamics of the web as much as the adoption of web APIs. By complementing web APIs and RSS, web hooks will give us empowering infrastructure similar to Unix command pipelining, but on a grander scale. Pipes for the web have not yet been fully realized, but web hooks can change this. They also come with the added potential for allowing users to customize and extend web applications.

In this talk, Jeff Lindsay will describe the pattern in theory and by example, and explain the implications and importance of mass adoption.

HTML5 is awesome. Well, it will be awesome when it's finally ready. Probably.

The bad news is that by the time the W3C have finished monkeying with HTML5, I'll probably have given up on the web as a whole and taken up meat goat farming.

The good news (for you, me and the goats) is that there's no need to wait for a lot of the functionality that HTML5 promises; we can start using them right now. In this session I'm going to show you how you can steal these features from the Flash Player and use them in your standards-based sites or applications, without even a sniff of Flash on the page.

After helping Adobe develop multiple tools related to driving Adobe apps from AIR applications and Flash Panels, Dr. Woohoo has an inside view of how to combine these worlds in order to create tools, designs and animations that would otherwise be insane to attempt without them. Woohoo will demonstrate how he’s generating his artwork using two new Adobe tools that simplify the process of driving Illustrator, Photoshop (and maybe After Effects) from AIR applications and/or Flash Panels, as well as generating scripts for Maya and Painter. This inspiring session will also explore new color, brush and experimental tools Woohoo has created for Adobe and for his own company with the objectives of streamlining the creative process, while also kicking open the doors to new creative possibilities.

In this session we'll cover the basics of SWX: what it is and what it is best used for, how systemwide simplicity benefits developers, how to use the free public gateway for integrating APIs into your mobile and web applications, and plans for the upcoming ActionScript 3 release.

We are in the midst of a Personal Brand gold rush and too many people are sitting on the side lines missing out. With the social media tools currently available, there is an unprecedented opportunity to reach new audiences and build your brand. Gary will discuss the ramifications of personal branding and highlight the boundless opportunities for businesses at all stages of development.

How would you build a Flash widget that is used by hundreds of millions of users every day? In this session we'll talk about rebuilding the YouTube video players. Part case study, part tutorial, this session will talk about how we went about rebuilding what is possibly the internet's most used Flash widget.

Illustrations aren't just for kids. They are being used more and more across the web to convey an abstract idea, complement instructions or to personalize and localize content to the user. Illustration, used in the right way, engages the user and offers a richer browsing experience with a touch of whimsy.

haXe is a improved programming language for Flash, but not only. What haXe is, what it does and how it could be useful to you ? You'll get answers to all these questions by the end of Nicolas talk.

Learn how to use SWFObject 2 to embed Adobe Flash content into web pages. This session will discuss all ins and outs, from the most basic hello world example to topics like Full Browser Flash, ActionScript-to-JavaScript communication, alternative content for people without Flash, SEO, Adobe Express Install and hacking around with the new SWFObject 2 JavaScript API.

Your content, be it information, marketing or your products, is the core of your website. Why lock any user agent out? Stephanie will discuss techniques you can use today to make your content available to everyone including search engine spiders, mobile devices, assistive technology, low vision users and more. The web is for everyone. Make sure your content is too.

Find inspiration in the ridiculous. See technological quirks as opportunities. Try something previously unheard of with your site design. Laugh in the face of convention. Use and abuse CSS in ways never before imagined. Get away with it. And if it doesn't work, try something else instead.

A change from the previously advertised session, by popular request, this is a more involved session both for people writing their own content and copy and people looking to bring a copywriter or content writer onto a project.

Using AIR's FileStream normally causes your swf to stop working on the web. I'll show how to use one SWF to rule both desktop and web. Automatically switching to the appropriate save (http post or AIR) in whatever context it's in, via the troyworks framework library.

This session will show you just how easy it can be to start using Version Control in your next development project.

Robert will introduce the 'Git' Version Control System, taking you through the basic techniques you'll use on a day-to-day basis. He'll show you how Git works just as well for the single developer as it does for larger teams. Finally, he'll give an overview of the popular third-party Git hosts and how these can provide even more tools to aid collaboration.

Web typography is hard. There's only a few fonts that can be used reliably, and browsers haven't really been innovating their way out of this problem. Instead, we're stuck with hacks like generated images or Flash movies.

This session takes you through a history of browser support for web typography, shows the alternatives that have been developed and teaches you how to use sIFR 3, the biggest hack of them all. sIFR uses Flash movies with embedded fonts to render text in your favourite font, and v3 is developed by Mark Wubben.

When we talk about Web standards, we discuss coding for compliance, portability, and accessibility -- but Web standards alone won't give you a quality user experience. Any time you collaborate on a Web site, some additional design and development standards must be crafted and followed in order to achieve consistency, both from a code and a design perspective. Learn how companies big and small develop internal standards and best practices to help manage the work generated by designers and developers.

Wordpress is a popular and powerful open source publishing engine which can be used for personal blogging or professional content management. It was built to be extended, allowing users to customise and expand it with additional features as they wish.

If you have ever wondered how to produce you own Wordpress plugin this session is for you. During this presentation you will be introduced to Wordpress, it's various forms, and then be taken on a tour through the various ways of plugging into the Wordpress engine.

Following a review of the key components of its Administrative Interface you will be shown the core plugin functions of Wordpress and how to use them. Finally you will see how to weave your own plugin which you can install on your own blog.

By the end of the session you will know how to:

• safely hook into the Wordpress engine.
• filter your Wordpress content.
• weave your own widget.
• know where to get more help.

Warning, this session will include code.

As we begin using our mobile devices in new ways, we are faced with new problems: size, speed, functionality and connectedness. We need to learn how to design specialized UI designed for the fast mobile life-style.

Spit shine that Stormtrooper helmet and come learn about Silverlight, Microsoft's foray into rich web UI technology. Hear about the good and bad first hand from a day-to-day Silverlight user. Where there's new, there's plenty of opportunity so come and find out how Silverlight can make you stronger, more popular and better looking.

Implementing accessibility fixes without understanding why is liable to make things worse rather than better. We need to understand the real issues, and with that understanding build solutions with confidence.

This session explains how accessibility fits into the modern conception of the World Wide Web, how people with disabilities use computers and the Web. With that understanding we take a holistic and modern look at what it is to make content accessible, and avoiding the minefields that still catch out many technology experts.

When you go to a web design/development conference, you are largely preaching to the converted - everyone understands why web standards are the way to go, and knows the big picture. But how do we push the message outside this select audience? Even today, a scarily low number of web sites pass W3C validation.

There are many reasons for this - education in web standards is a very hit and miss affair, many people feel that they don't need to bother with web standards because they can still earn their crust without bothering, there are many hobbyists out there who want to get their content online and don't care how, and corporations are often locked into non-standards-aware infastructures where publishing standards compliant content is hard even if you want to.

To help improve things, many initiatives are being started to provide extensive learning material, course structures and guidance for teaching "the proper web standards way".

In this talk, I will cover all of this stuff. I'll:

• Look at the current state of web standards adoption
• Talk about who doesn't use standards these days, and should
• Discuss strategies to get these groups to make the change, and improve the level of standards adoption
• Look at new web standards educational initiatives, and how they will help
• Talk about what the future will hold for these initiatives

Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up.

I will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein.

The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited for site in the right direction. However it brings with it a host of complications; technical, ethical and aesthetic.

This session will explain all.

Over the last few years The Second Life platform has been used to host numerous virtual conferences like <head> where real people have gathered from around the world, to talk, listen, learn and importantly meet each other. This session will discuss what I've learned from attending, presenting and chairing many sessions at virtual conferences in Second Life.

Web design as a profession is still in its infancy and and we're only just started to scratch the surface. Rather than trying to re-invent the wheel, we'd be wise to look around us and draw inspiration from more established industries. There are obvious correlations between what we do and the built environment, so the field of architecture is a natural target. In fact, we already use terms such as information architect to describe a portion of what we do and techniques like design patterns which have their roots in the architectural world.

During this talk, Andy will guide you through some of the core architectural concepts that relate to the web. He'll look at how architects attempt to guide human behaviour through the physical spaces they create and how we can bring some of these practices into our own daily lives. By the end of this talk you should have a new found appreciation for the field of architecture and never look at buildings quite the same way again.

In this quick tour, we'll discover 5 critical pieces that you need to make your Ajax more accessible. Keep these things in mind while you're building your sites and apps, and you're on the right path.

Let's discover what makes a visualization, or an infographic different and what are the clues to reach our users with an emotional touch. Infographics or 'infografía', as we say in Spain, redefined.

CSS radically changes the way we can alter the presentation of our documents. As designers, though, we sometimes limit our designs by taking CSS properties at their face value. In this session, walk through how to take various strategies for working with CSS to create a rich visual presentation out of everyday markup.

A look at the original vision of the Web, how that has changed for both the bad and the good, and a discussion on how we can return to the vision while innovating for the future.

How and why convey what to whom—when, where, and with which intended result? Strategic counsel, practical advice, pithy insights, helpful tips, and vivid case studies from around the world… Best practices in design and visual communication for designers, writers, and managers responsible for creating identities, communications, and targeted information tools.

Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet—can you achieve them consistently in your own projects?

In this session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of Designing the Moment (New Riders) and the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious (New Riders), describes the qualities of great web-based software and how to achieve them. See why it’s important to build only what’s absolutely essential, apply instructive design, create error-proof interactions, surface commonly-used features, and more in this informative session that will change the way you work and enable your users to walk away from your software feeling productive, respected, and smart.

Since the end of the 70's we consider that computers (and mobile phones) are the only way to interact with information. Now the time has come to go to the next step.

Everybody is a critic. Rarely do you meet a client who doesn't have a personal opinion about design. They don't like green, they want the logo bigger, the tweaks and changes are endless. In this presentation Paul discusses how to make the process of sign off less painful. From how you develop and present design concepts to coping with common complaints. You will never find the perfect client but this presentation will allow you to manage them more effectively.

We live in a game-changing age that's both disruptive and democratic, and requires that we challenge our past assumptions and play by new rules. It's clear to us industry insiders life as usual has forever been altered, but our formal educational systems trail behind and aren't keeping pace. What are the challenges to education in this age – where is the correct balance between real and virtual? Lynda Weinman, founder of lynda.com (one of the largest online education subscription sites in the world) discusses her views on this and related topics such as assessment, mentorship, authenticity, advertising, subscriber support, information, inspiration, and much more. Defining the role between the computer and the teacher, what is left best to technology and left best to live human interaction, is going define the future of education.

Once we progress from the User Centered Design to Community Centered Design we’ll need to identify and gather a similar set of best practices regarding it’s Community design. This presentation collects more or less the key features and interactions that a successful Community should display in order to empower their users and facilitate conversation between its members.

This presentation aims to be a bridge between Usability Best Practices and Community Centered Design, a practice that can maximize the networking and crowd effect under online user communities.

A tale of Japanese mummies, karmic balance and benevolent dictators. Learn how to set up a flourishing developer community or just help to ignite your favourite. Understand the different open source licenses and their implications for your code base or company. Your guide to putting a torch to your open source community.

The surprising story of how the Web emerged quite unexpectedly from one of the smallest and weakest parts of the CERN hierarchy.

Get a glimpse behind the scenes and learn about the approach, philosophy, structure, process, techniques and culture of award winning creative agency Big Spaceship.

This is my story. The ups and downs of freelancing, and organising a conference on the subject, Going Solo.

I've been a freelancer since early 2005 (full-time since mid-2006), and since then, I've seen good times and bad times, made mistakes, and learned quite a bit.

In this session, I'll tell you my story, and the most important things I've learned. I could also title it "on being human: never listening to what others tell you".

This session looks at Adobe's AIR runtime and discusses how you can best develop applications that run seamlessly in both an online and desktop environment. You'll learn all about leveraging the Filesystem API, work with SQLite databases, use drag 'n drop functionality and implementing system notifications.

In this session we'll look at how to create stunning visual effects using the Flash API and AS3. Although technical, this session will also be targeted at Designers, since they'll be utilizing these types of effects in their projects. We'll be looking at 2D effects and how to efficiently create them in Flash, as well as look at 3D effects using the Shader API in Papervision3D and how this was created.

The book Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move!, Keith described many of the basic techniques for coding animation in Flash - velocity, acceleration, easing, springs, 3D, etc.

There was a lot that didn't make it into that book though. In this session, Keith will introduce you to a few more advanced techniques planned for an upcoming sequel to Making Things Move.

The web is finally moving beyond simple html. How can you make rich web-based user experiences that don't surprise or aggravate your users? When should you use AJAX, when should you use Flash, and when should you mix the two? What are the opportunities and pitfalls when creating richer web interfaces? In this talk, Jonathan will argue that Flash and AJAX are complementary tools in the web developers' toolbox, and that building effective web experiences often requires a blending of the two technologies.

Challenges and opportunities for creators in the participative age: co-creation, digital communities, & user engagement.

The mobile marketplace is a fragmented difficult place to cater for if you're a developer.

The OEM's, operators and various platform owners don't appear to help the situation either, but what if mobile is critical to your project/product? Do you cover all the bases or hedge your bets and go with a specific technology? And, what about the next few years? How will that impact what you're planning now?

Each situation has it's own answers to these questions, but I want to examine a little bit about why we're in this situation in the first place.

Let's bust some myths about mobile, talk about fragmentation a little bit and think about what's coming down the pipes in the near enough future.

Doing things in your own inimitable way makes perfect sense when you are working alone. But what happens when you start working with other people on the same project? Now imagine that “other people” is a collection of developers distributed across the entire globe.

As part of his role, Norm has to establish best practices and coding standards for Yahoo! front end developers. He will take you through his process for establishing rational standards within a distributed team, and illustrate with some examples.

Government information can make a substantial contribution to the development of the semantic web yet the public sector has been slow to embrace the opportunities afforded by this technology. Why?

This session will explore strategies and approaches for semantically enabling government information for the semantic web, with a focus on pragmatic technologies that governments can adopt and use. It will explore the issues that arise and the benefits that occur.

The use of narrative isn't limited to telling stories. Learn how and why.