I got my first computer when I was 4 years old which, for those of you who know me, probably explains a lot. It was an Acorn Electron, it had 32KB of RAM, it cost my parents a fortune and, until 1993, it was my only real piece of computing kit. Sure, I had an Atari 2600, but with my Electron, I could play games that I'd bought, type out page after page of code from "Electron User" to run games featured in the magazine's pages – because my parents couldn't get the version with the tape on the front – and, ultimately, learn BASIC and create my own software.

My parents' gift and foresight – in seeing the value of buying a computer for me at such an early age – were probably the most valuable things I would be given at such an early age, despite not knowing it until long after I'd left school. Aside from hours spent playing Repton, Elite and the myriad of other fantastic Superior Software games, the Electron gave me a grounding in programming, something which has been a huge contribution to who I am and what I do today.

The Computer Room

By the time I was 10, we'd moved from the centre of Birmingham to the suburb of Great Barr on the very edges of the city, and in September 1990, I started secondary school at Stuart Bathurst R.C. High School. My earlier tour of the four-storey building that formed part of my new school in Wednesbury, hadn't included a visit to the room in the corner of the top floor which housed the Maths department, but my first lesson in that room changed everything.

At my primary school – St. Catherine's in Birmingham, if you must know – we had a single RM machine. I can't remember much about it, apart from the fact that it was very basic and didn't sound anything like my computer sounded when it was loading programs from the cassette tapes. But this amazing computer room was packed full of computers – a few Archimedes machines, but mostly BBC Micros hooked up to monitors of varying capabilities.

Slightly more amazing than the lab full of computing equipment, however, was the teacher who inhabited it.

The Nun

During the 80s, I'd grown up with the vision of bespectacled old men with beards who taught computing – if you're around my age, and you had any interest in computing around that time, you might remember The Computer Programme which was commissioned by the BBC. The story is much longer and complicated but, as basically as possible, Acorn Computers and the BBC had designed the BBC Micro to be an essential part of british education, and it certainly fellt like Stuart Bathurst had embraced that vision with gusto.

Except that whilst sometimes seen wearing glasses, our teacher didn't have a beard and wasn't a man, but was an intensely intimidating nun, who went by the name of Sister Celsus. Those that messed with her soon learned not to, and it wasn't long until everyone was given a basic understanding of computing and the BBC BASIC langauge.

The small handful of us who had already been exposed to BBC BASIC and knew our way around the computers were quickly identified and nurtured, motivated into spending more time with the computers and often pushed, in class, to deliver advanced work. In the first two years at the school, we were given access to the computer room at lunchtimes and some were even given access to help out with more technical projects, taught about databases and more interesting uses of the machines.

Long before computing became part of any syllabus, Sister Celsus was teaching kids how to program, how to properly interact with computers – not simply how to use Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and choose Comic Sans as your font.

Whatever happened to Computing in schools?

At the start of my second year, the BBC Micros had all but been replaced by Archimedes machines, and by the start of my third, RM-branded, watered-down PCs – no doubt cheaper than their Acorn counterparts – had started to make their way into the computing lab, and many classrooms around the school. Computing became less of a subject about programming and more about how to use computers for everyday needs, for writing letters, creating presentations and basically learning how to get around Windows.

When the time came to move into my third year, Sister Celsus had left the school, and the real passionate forces behind computing at Bathurst began to disappear. More and more Windows PCs, complete with ClarisWorks and very early versions of Microsoft Office, became commonplace throughout the school. Of course, a handful of students used to spend as much time on the remaining BBC and Acorn machines, mucking around and playing games like Elite and Exile until as late as 1993 on machines which had been distributed throughout the school.

It was around that time that my Electron moved to it's final resting place in my parent's loft, shortly after they'd bought me a Commodore Amiga. I'm sure both computers are still up there, and I imagine they both still work, though, if I remember correctly, one of the Electron's loose chips might need a bit of a jiggle in order to get it running again – something those who teach computing could probably do with. I got further involved in BASIC programming through AMOS Professional on my Amiga, but the early lessons in how to program stuck with me.

Much of everything I've heard about ICT classes in schools recently makes me cringe. Horror stories of students being taught that the style of a presentation is more important than the content, and – particularly abhorrent to me – students being taught how to create websites using PowerPoint. Friends of mine who actually failed their ICT course because they created a website using commercially acceptable methods instead of using Microsoft Office to do so. Perhaps it's just my interest in the field that clouds my memories, but I remember my computing classes being nothing like that – while we did learn how to use word processors and other applications, we were always encouraged to find new uses for the technology we were using.

Yes, there have been whispers of suggestions from Whitehall that the teaching of programming will be making a comeback to our schools, but it's the likes of Anna Debenham, who I'm sure will be the subject of many future ALD-themed blog posts, who are the real pioneers here. Becoming involved in schemes where us developers actually go out into schools and ask to be part of unconventional ICT lessons is a great way to help in this area – it's just a shame that teaching students something that doesn't involve office productivity software is labelled as unconventional.

Perhaps what should be thought of as unconventional is actually teaching kids – the potential developers of tomorrow – how to learn, and how to keep up with the rapidly changing standards and moving targets of modern web development.

Being thankful

Having a teacher like Sister Celsus bolstered the investment my parents had made, and whilst no-one stepped into the void left by her with the same level of interest, the time she dedicated to the subject galvanised my interest in the subject. I'd probably still be doing something with regards to computers right now, but I doubt I'd be as interested as I am had it not been for her.

Perhaps it's down to the fact that computing has become so ubiquitous, so big a part in everyday life, that the teaching of the subject has become so watered down, but I hope there are still teachers out there who recognise pupils with a knack for computing and who give them the same level of encouragement that I received from that amazing little Irish nun.

This entry is my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day 2011. You may also be interested in The Nun and the Archimedes – my buddy Matt Patterson's ALD post from 2009.

Chris Ross (@darkrock on twitter), as part of his excellent talk on defining success on the App Store at iOSDevUK last week, said something that resonated with me. Based around the topic of iterating and evolution, Chris said that collaboration helps to bring great ideas to the forefront and to filter out the bad ones.

Coming from Brighton, Chris has access to a plethora of dense tech talent in a relatively small area, and as he discussed how he found his business partner through the Brighton iPhone Creators meetup, he said something really quite profound.

If a local group exists, join it. If it doesn't, create one.

Chris Ross

This caused an almost involuntary tweet to spring, via my fingers, from my brain:

The response from Dave Addey and other midlands-based attendees was encouraging enough for us to get together during the BarCamp that evening and fix a date and a venue – or, in this case, two venues.

When and where?

We're going to meet up on every fourth Thursday of the month, and we're going to alternate the venue on a two-month basis.

Starting on September 22nd this year, we'll meet in Leamington Spa on the odd months of the year – that'll be January, March, May, July, September and November. I'll be speaking to people at The White Horse, The Sozzled Sausage and The Fox who all have rooms that would be available for such a gathering.

Then, starting on October 27th this year, we'll meet in Birmingham on the even months of the year – that'll be February, April, June, August and October. I imagine you may have other things on you rmind, or be somewhere else on the fourth Thursday of December, so we'll have a festive break during that month. I've already spoken to people at Birmingham Science Park Aston who would be very happy to host us for such an event.

As for a name, we've gone for "iOS Midlands Meetup" – if you've got a better idea, I'm all ears – the events are listed on Lanyrd as "iOS Midlands Meetup" (or just subscribe to the events in your calendar) so if you're interested in attending, please add yourself on Lanyrd.

So the local group now exists. All you need to do now is join it.

A colleague just got in touch with me, as they'd heard about this brand new social network that was coming from Google, and wanted to know my opinions.

One of the first things I saw about Google+ was their lovely interactive tour, which uses the Google Maps engine to serve up a huge great big image – something we were talking about last night, at the Leamington Multipack meet-up, was this exact technology and how you don't need Silverlight or Flash to make it work.

Google's design, of late, has really stepped up a gear – the interface design shown in the tour is lovely, and there are a bunch of really nice little touches – when you drag a contact into a circle, for instance.

Having seen most of the 'bits' that make up Google+, it looks like they are nothing more than add-ons to the Google experience. So the social aspect will be handled by the Circles 'app'. Talking to groups of people will be handled by the Huddle 'app'. Photos and image sharing by the Images 'app'.

Why quote 'app'? Because I think these individual bits are akin to the way that Facebook refers to 'apps' on their platform. So while both Facebook and Google+ are apps built atop their respective platforms, Google's collection of services and apps are an evolution of what's already there, with the addition of a few new things.

Arguably, Circles already exists, to a certain extent, if you're a Google Profile user – you can add contacts to groups on your profile – but it looks like Google are taking this a step further. Additionally, while there are bound to be tons of differences in the way that Google+ and Facebook are perceived, my take is that Google+ will be more of an experience built on top of the things you already do on Google.

What do I mean by that? Well, different to Facebook, I don't think that Google+ will be a destination, per sé. You won’t need to go to plus.google.com to do everything – though I'm sure you'll be able to – but you’ll go to the individual bits that you want to use Google Circles, or Google Huddle.

This is, in a way, analogous to going to the different apps within Facebook, with the exception that while Facebook is a walled garden that does its best to keep the internet out, Google will embrace the internet and make your ‘social experience’ part of it – especially when you’re searching for things, because that's where most people will see their interactions and, knowing Google, they'll do their best to make your friends suggestions have an impact on the results they serve to you.

So, if you think of Google+ as a social network, my honest opinion is that it’ll take a couple of years – at least – for it to gain any sort of critical mass. For the vast majority of users, I don't see a mass exodus from Facebook any time soon, especially given that Google is doing this on an invitation-only basis right now.

But, if you think of Google+ as an extension of Google’s current service offerings, who knows what to expect. It's something to watch, certainly; something to think about, definitely; but something to do something about right now?

I can't say I'm sure it is.

It's that time of year again:

In it's fourth year, the A List Apart Web Design Survey gives us all a chance to stand up and be counted, and offers valuable insights into the state of our profession.

The ALA team released the results from 2009's survey last month, something they promise will take a lot less time with this iteration, and the findings are interesting and just might be incredibly useful to you or your team.

If you work on the web, take 5 minutes out of your busy day and take this year's survey.

The saying goes: "Nobody reads anymore."

I don't agree entirely, but some of us - myself included, on more than one occasion - have failed to read a piece properly, getting halfway through before jumping to an incorrect conclusion based on half a story; or have felt so inflamed by an opening paragraph that we don't get past it to read the remaining text.

I'd originally planned on penning this post as a lament and a whinge on the sad state of affairs that continue to surround the development of Tweetie 2 and the continuing lack of clarity from Loren Brichter but, since yesterday morning, a lot of people picked up on a tweet from Evan Williams, the ex-CEO of Twitter, on his #AskEv slot, and have taken that to mean that Twitter 2 has now been canned.

Originally, that's what I thought. But I read it again:

I seem to recall that Loren Brichter's company, atebits, was acquired purely for the Tweetie for iOS and that Tweetie for Mac wasn't something that would be actively developed - so Evan is just reiterating what he said all along. After all, Loren was hired into the mobile team, and that's his day job as far as Twitter, Inc. is concerned.

Whilst the question was asked a day before Ev's "we're not investing" tweet, Tom Hannibal's interaction with Loren - whilst characteristically uncertain - did suggest that Tweetie 2 for Mac may still see the light of day:

Beware the double negative - it caught a few people out, Tom himself included - which suggests that it's happening, though when it'll happen is another subject altogether. One thing, however, is for certain - Twitter, Inc. considers Twitter.com to be the official desktop client, and thus they won't invest into Tweetie for Mac, so if it is going to happen, it'll be happening in Loren's own time.

My opinion is that Tweetie 2 will arrive at some point, but I won't be holding my breath. I'm already considering dropping my moratorium on Adobe AIR apps and evaluating a few of the AIR-powered Twitter clients, since that's where the majority of them seem to be, but - for now - I'm going to continue looking for a native OS X client.

Send recommendations and wish me luck!

Last week, whilst searching around, for the umpteenth time, for an application or website that would help me search through my tweets, I came across a wonderful web application called Tweet Nest. 

Made by Andy Graulund (who has a lovely visual blog), it is a beautifully designed web application designed to work on your own LAMP stack. Following a very quick and easy-to-follow install. Tweet Nest grabs your tweets and your profile and stores them locally in a MySQL database and allows you to browse through them using a simple interface. 

Of course, you don't need to expose your archive to the web, as I have done, and can instead choose to run Tweet Nest locally on your own computer. This comes with its advantages and disadvantages, the most glaring being that you need to have your computer with you whenever you want to use your archive of tweets.

Sadly, because Twitter only exposes your last 3,200 tweets via the website and the API, you'll only be able to retrieve your most recent 3,200 tweets. At the time of writing, I've amassed over 4,500 since January 2007 when I signed up, which means that over 1,300 of my earlier ephemeral musings are, for the time being, unavailable to the general public. Twitter say they'll eventually give us access to these tweets.

For now you're safe, and despite the fact that this is probably no bad thing right now, I can think of at least two main reasons why you'd want to keep hold of your entire twitter history:

Twitter won't go offline tomorrow... right?

I'm sure many people thought exactly the same thing about ma.gnolia. The number of factors affecting an application's availability is probably as huge as the amount of faith each of us puts in the online services we use on a daily basis. 

While Twitter is unlikely to go out of business tomorrow, there's always a possibility that they'll be acquired by a bigger fish at some point in the future - a fish whose privacy policies and track records make it difficult for some of us to continue using the service.

Tweet Nest means that, in the unlikely event that my tweets disappear from their original source overnight, I'll at least have all of my tweets up to the last half hour. 

Cloudy, with a chance of missing tweet history

When Twitter Inc. acquired Summize, I believed that Twitter's search engine would become much more useful. Sadly, there's still no built-in way to search your tweets further back than 10 days in the past, so a huge draw for me would be an application that allows me to do just that - search through my older tweets.

On a number of occasions, I've used Remy Sharp's excellent Snap Bird service to attempt to look into my twittering past. Snap Bird is, essentially, a version of Tweet Nest that's built to run within your browser, powered by JavaScript. It's also open source, just like Tweet Nest, which means that if you wanted to tweak it, to use HTML5 local storage for instance, you'd be able to.

Sadly, because there's limited error handling built into the app - something you'd be able to fix, if you wanted to contribute to the project - it becomes frustrating when the Twitter JSON API craps out midway through a search. This happens to me at least once every time I use it, something which probably won't with Tweet Nest.

Fire and Forget

Finally, once set up, with the addition of adding a couple of cron jobs, I never need to worry about the application again - bar updates, of course. By adding two lines to my crontab, my tweets are fetched every half hour between 6am and 1am, and my user profile is updated once a day.

If you're not familiar with the syntax necessary to create a cron job, just follow these instructions once you've installed Tweet Nest:

• Open up a terminal window and, if your solution is hosted on a server, ssh into your server using your normal account.
• Type crontab -e and hit enter.

• Add the following lines to the text editor that apepars

  0,30 0-1,6-23 * * * php /tweetnestpath/maintenance/loadtweets.php > /dev/null 2>&1
0 0 * * * php /tweetnestpath/maintenance/loaduser.php > /dev/null 2>&1

  Note: Obviously, you'll want to replace /tweetnestpath/ with the actual path to your installation.)

• Save your changes (usually CTRL-O) and exit the editor (usually CTRL-X)

Your new crontab will now be installed, and you should find your new tweets added to your local database every half hour. This is what works for me, but you may find that your server won't allow you to run custom cron jobs. If in doubt, you could always ask a bunch of people who know what they're talking about.

Looking forward to looking backward

I've only been playing with Tweet Nest for a few days, so I'm still finding things out. Already, however, I can see that it's a well made piece of software and I'd recommend it to anyone who values their tweeting history.

If you're not quite ready to take the plunge yourself and would just like to take a look at how it works, head over to http://tweetnest.abitgone.co.uk.

I've wanted to attend dConstruct for a few years, and whilst various things have previously stood in my way - dates, other events, me being out of the country, not even knowing the event existed - this year, I finally got my chance to go.

Friends have always described it as one of the conferences to go to and, with a packed Brighton Dome, it was easy to see they weren't alone. dConstruct had lots to live up to.

(Spoiler: I wasn't disappointed.)

The Talks

Jeremy Keith jumped on stage to welcome everyone - the vast majority of whom had travelled, and around two-thirds of whom, like me, were attending their first dConstruct - to the day which, in words which I wholeheartedly agreed with, featured a "fucking awesome lineup of speakers".

As compères go, Jeremy was great: enthusiastic about his speakers, anecdotal about the venue (did you know that ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo at the Brighton Dome in 1974?) as well as quite humourous - though I'm not quite sure I wanted to test him on his offer of turning my phone into silent mode in an "anatomically painful way", so I stuck mine into Airplane Mode. Just in case.

This did, sadly, have the unfortunate side-effect of making it very difficult to check how well #SausageBap was trending.

Marty Neumeier

Marty's opening talk, "The Designful Company", was based around the premise that innovation and design are inextricably linked and so that if you want to innovate, you've got to design.

Photo credit: Stefan Nitzsche

He spoke about how brands are not in the owner's control, but rather are the sum of your customers' gut feelings about your product or company and that, in order to succeed in business, innovation is key: "When everyone else zigs, zag". How do you know if you're zagging? If you have a swoosh in your logo, you zigged and, since the globe is the new swoosh, if you've got one of those, you zigged too.

In most cases, innovating means not always asking people what they want - and is usually not always immediately successful. Marty showed a great matrix of good and different, suggesting that "good and different" does poorly in tests and can go to market with difficulty. However, customers soon equate different with good, and the product or service ends up with massive market share and is eventually successful. It needs to be different, but it needs to be good too.

The key point, I feel, was that it's important to make your products and services stand out and that they need to be good, but that you should always make your products for your audience, not your focus groups.

Brendan Dawes

The term 'brendandawesome' was used to introduce Brendan to the stage, and with apparent good reason. From the moment the first slide hit the screen, I knew this would be something fairly special. This wasn't going to be your standard, run-of-the-mill Powerpoint or Keynote slideshow. His slides, which were introduced chirpily with "I've got animations and shit!", were put together in processing and, better still, if you're into that, you can go and download the source files.

Photo credit: happy.apple

Brendan's first major points were that, with better input, we have better output (analogous to the 'shit in, shit out' theory, but with a positive spin I suppose) and that there is inherent joy to be found in the process of making things. The iPhone - which Brendan referred to as a 'digital collection device' - is so magical because it can be transformed into anything, with any user interface, because it has very few hardware limitations.

By that same reasoning, he also declared notebooks - of the paper kind - magical. They too, for example, have no inherent restrictions, but are simply analog collection devices. The mistakes inherent in the things they are used to collect are wonderful, because you can jot and collect quickly. iPhones and notebooks: they're both as magical as each other.

And so he got to the theme of his presentation: Boiling - bringing the stuff together, bringing it up to the boil - and simmering - keep changing context, get opinions, play around with it - before reducing it and taking things away until there is nothing left to take away. Einstein was a big advocate of this: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler". 

Brendan's key takeaway, for me, was that you should always make the process fun. His talk was as entertaining as it was informative, and - as he put it - unless you're designing critical things, no-one will die if you change things during your play/design process. Throw out the rules - in fact, don't even bother learning the rules.

David McCandless

I'd previously seen David give hints towards the subject matter of his talk when he was on television at the beginning of August, but his talk was far more entertaining than his brief stint on BBC Newsnight. During his session, he stressed that it can be hugely difficult for people to visualise any data set. The example given in this respect was the talk of billions being bandied around by various bodies - companies, news organisations, even our governments - in such a way that the layman finds it difficult to make any sense of them.

Billion-Dollar-o-Gram - http://www.informationisbeautiful.net

By giving context to the different amounts, as he did in his Billion-Dollar-o-Gram (a snippet of which is shown above), it makes it easier for anyone to see the scale of each of the amounts. As in the title of his book, he believes that "Information is Beautiful", and that we should make it as easy as possible for users to understand, to relate to and - more importantly - to trust our data.

David - who isn't a formally-trained designer - thinks that data is the new soil - not oil - and that good design can sprout and flower from it. Referring back to Brendan's presentation, he was keen to suggest that you don't need to be trained (throw out the rules) in order to give insight and that, in his opinion, the more exposure we have to various kinds of media and visualisations, the more our latent/nascent design skills and visual literacy will flourish.

His opinion, that combining the languages of the eye - patterns and colours - and the mind - information and data - can only be a recipe for success, seemed to make sense. It's important, however, to make sure that you don't just throw things together in a way that makes the data lose its context. Spaghetti graphs and circular diagrams may look pretty, but they're not very usable. 

To finish up the session, David had some fun interaction, using Google Insights, whereby the audience would guess what a subject was based on him telling us what one line was, and us guessing what the other trend was.

And we all learned that, despite what you may think, twitter is not better than sex.

Samantha Warren

I know of many people who will agonise over the choice of typeface used in logos, publications and in everyday objects, and Samantha's talk on the Power and Beauty of Typography exposed her instantly as one of those people.

She's also either a Wondermark fan, like me, or David Malki's an SEO wizard and Samantha got lucky with Google Image search. Whichever of those two is true, Samantha equates herself with the guy in the comic below:

I must admit, I'm very much a typography nerd, but while I can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica I'm nowhere near the alpha-nerd status that some of my buddies are. So it's good to know that being trendy does not simply mean choosing a typeface that hasn't been used before - a good point raised during this talk was that kookiness is not equal to being trendy, but rather that versatility is trendy. 

Samantha declared 2010 the year of internet typography, which probably explains why I got the feeling that I'd heard the core points of this talk a good few times already - yes, words say more with the right typeface; no, you should not get in your users' way; yes, you should take care to choose the right typeface for the job; and, no, you should not choose a dozen typefaces for a single design - but, thankfully for Samantha, never before delivered with her amount of enthusiasm.

John (Fucking) Gruber

Speaking in the UK for the first time, John Gruber's talk was built up around his extensive passion for film and a simple, elegant theory: that the quality of any collaborative creative endeavour tends to approach the level of taste of whoever has control.

Photo credit: happy.apple

Comparing different media - books, symphonies, movies, TV shows and general design - John argued that whilst a book or a symphony can be written by a single person, authorship in the case of movies, movie-grade television shows and larger design projects doesn't work in the same way, and tends to be the product of a large team of people.

While this team of people may well be largely comprised of very talented individuals, the quality of the end result lies in the hand of the person at the helm - the director, the showrunner, the auteur. John's enthusiasm for movies - particularly Kubrick's work (explaining his use of the Futura Extra Bold typeface in his presentation) - shone through in his talk with him picking various examples of how Kubrick thought about the same subject.

In terms of the industry I inhabit, a question that can be asked often is this: why are some websites not great, despite the level of the talent of the developers and designers? Case in point: The criticism, response from and almost immediate stupidity and incompetence of American Airlines. Their web team is clearly staffed with people who want to do better, who want to act as a small, agile team, but who are stifled by people with no taste.

As someone in charge of a team of developers (but, sadly, no full-time web designer) I am constantly trying to make sure that the right decisions are made. As Gruber said, if 'great' is on the table along with 'good' and 'okay', then you must always go with 'great'. If you can't tell the difference, that's where the problem lies.

Hannah Donovan

As conference sessions go, Hannah Donovan's was probably the most unique I've ever seen. Starting your session with a piece of live, improvised music was an interesting way to open, and showed that Hannah is an accomplished player of the cello, accompanied by Jeremy Keith and Matthew Ogle on the mandolin and piano respectively. 

Photo credit: Phillip Ingham

Jam session over, Hannah took to the stage to explain what improvisation can teach us about design. Improvisation; spontaneity; something done in the moment that is done in response to your immediate environment. In doing this, in getting feedback, in having our work repurposed by other team members, or even other friends and peers, we're helped to see our work in different lights.

Explaining improvisation in music and how it applies to collaboration was interesting and playback, in the musical sense, was touted as an example - whereby a member of a group of musicians playing will listen to one piece played and play it back, during the improvised performance.

The equivalents to this in our world - Dribble and Twitter in a less realtime sense, and Layer Tennis in the live, under-pressure sense - were cited as examples of where this can take place. Most importantly, Hannah's explanation of having the best ideas in conversation really struck home for me though, as collaboration and the desire to better our work, to respond to others', enhances everyone's.

James Bridle

Unless you were at the conference, there is no way to sum up how good James' introduction to his talk was. In summary, as most of us who had internet connections in the mid-to-late nineties will attest to, the neighbourhood in which we grew up, in which we cut our teeth learning HTML and the fundamentals of today's web, is no longer around.

James, like many of us, grew up in Geocities, and the fact that Yahoo! decided to close the service means that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of information that, despite the best efforts of many individuals and organisations such as the Internet Archive, will inevitably have been lost. 

Photo credit: James Bridle

Using the Iraq War article on Wikipedia as an example, with a funny side note on Wikiracing (starting at a random page and getting to a target page in as few clicks as possible), James explained that Wikipedia is an excellent tool for historiography - the study of how history is written and knowledge of that history is built up - in that a full record of each and every modification is kept, giving us the ability to go back to a point in time and see what was written.

With data storage prices plummeting, it's no longer a case of us not being able to store everything, but rather taking the time to actually do so. Our future selves will better understand the code we write and, in the larger sense, we will ensure that we don't endure the same losses of knowledge we've suffered in the past.

Tom Coates

In what was arguably the most beautiful slide deck I have ever had the privilege to witness first hand, Tom spoke to us about the move to network absolutely everything. Introducing himself as a person who looks at where he thinks the web is going and who tries to get there first - much better than simply calling himself a product developer - he spoke about services, objects and individuals being connected to the network, and the advantages that doing so brings.

Photo credit: Matt Biddulph 

Tom used Darius the Great, and the Persian Royal Road as an example of the earliest network, and the fact that despite the fact that the road network was built over two thousand years ago, it allowed an army miles and miles away from their supreme leader to receive orders within 24 hours. 

As network technologies become cheaper to implement and more ubiquitous - moving in the same direction that LCD clocks did - they'll be built into every device and, as this happens, society will begin to change as the concepts we know begin to change in response. Bruce Sterling coined the idea of a 'spime': an object that can always report its location, because it's always connected and, based on this, the whole idea of ownership changes.

Smart meters are already showing up in our homes, but as more objects become connected to the network, they start changing into 'objects as services' - why buy a washing machine when you can just have a machine in your house and pay for each wash you complete? Each service a network connected object can connect to gives it more context and, potentially, makes it better.

But then what about networked cities? How can they improve our lives? Tom used examples such as the recently launched London Cycle Hire system, whereby you no longer need to own a bike in London to be able to cycle around the city; and San Francisco's SFPark system, where parking availability is broadly available, and parking charges are no longer static, and are instead based on actual usage.

That said, I'm not so sure I want my scales to tweet how heavy I am!

Merlin Mann

I have to admit, I'm a big fan of You Look Nice Today - a journal of emotional hygiene (translation: hilarious podcast) featuring Merlin along with Adam Lisagor and Scott Simpson - so when I discovered that he would be among this year's speakers, it only increased my desire to attend.

Photo credit: designbyfront.com - Used with Permission

Whilst there were no slides, Merlin's talk was among my highlights of the day. He spoke about dedication, innovation and the constant desire to better yourself, not in the way that most 'inspirational speakers' do, but in a way that engaged the audience, made them smile and - for me, personally - made me reflect and think about how it applied to me.

The final session of the day left me smiling and feeling good, for Merlin has faith in us nerds, and with good reason - because we care. But there was no shortage of cautionary tales, the most striking of which was the example of a friend who stuck at the 'image slicing' method of web design when the world was changing around her.

Caring is good, but it's important to keep moving forward, to keep re-discovering what to be nerdy about next, but more importantly, to be around people who do what we do, better. Merlin's point was that it's easy for us nerds to become isolated, but that to get better, we need the advice of our peers, especially so when that advice - the good advice, the hard advice - is tough to take.

I took a piece of advice from Merlin that was easy: I bought him a beer at the afterparty, had a quick chat with him about my newborn son and about being a nerd.

Just like attending dConstruct, I'm thoroughly glad I did.

Whilst I'm no conference speaker, I've had the privilege of being invited to stand up in front of a group of my peers and talk about what I do on a few occasions. You won't need to view all 25 minutes of my session at The Multipack Presents to realise that, when it comes to delivering a talk, I'm firmly placed within the amateur group:

However, whilst I'm more of an attendee than a speaker, I'm also a relative newbie when it comes to conference attendance. My first, in October 2007, was in London at the Future of Web Apps Expo. Even as a lone delegate, I managed to become acquainted with a few other delegates who made the three days a little more interesting.

Choosing a conference

As a newbie, and even as a seasoned conference attendee, my thoughts are that the decision to attend a conference will be based on a few things:

• How much?
• What is the conference's primary theme or subject?
• Is it a multi-track conference?
• Who is speaking, and what are their talks about?

If the conference demonstrates value, I'll often approach my boss, but even before I'll think about doing that, I'll be asking myself whether I think the conference is affordable and offers good value for money, or whether it's just paying for a few people to come a long way.

Secondly, and most importantly, it's subject and theme. More and more conferences are moving away from the typical designer/developer divide and focusing on a theme or a subject. Instead of being developer-focused, for instance, a conference may lean towards development, but include a few talks on design that would be of benefit to the developers attending - and vice-versa, of course.

As for multiple track conferences, I'm not sure I'll visit another. FOWA London 2007 and 2008 were good, but the complexity of having a one-for-all type conference diluted the effectiveness. There were talks I wanted to see that overlapped which meant I missed some. Perhaps I'm lazy and don't want to move around too much, but a focussed event, with a single track, catering to a theme instead of splitting the audience needlessly, seems like a more successful idea to me.

Finally, which speakers will be there, and what are the subjects of their talks.

Who are you and what are you talking about?

I'm going to be really clear here. I cannot fucking stand it when I am sat in the audience, looking forward to a topic - based on the title, and what little blurb we're given - only to be let down by the speaker, who is only on stage to sell their product, doesn't really give a shit about the topic, and is talking to the wrong audience. On more than one occasion at the Future of Web Apps conferences, I simply got up and walked out of the hall, disgusted at this tactic.

Instead of entitling your talk "Special Announcement" when it's a sales message, or "Cloud Computing in the Enterprise" when it has nothing to do with cloud computing, but is more about using your SAAS offering instead of Microsoft Outlook, do the honourable thing - tell us it's a sales presentation.

Conference organisers should be ashamed of this too. Knowing, full well, that your sponsor is going to try to pull this tactic and doing nothing about it smacks of a lack of integrity. The right thing to do would be to approach your sponsor and suggest a different title of the topic. If it's a sponsorship message, let your audience know.

Lastly, the most important thing to do is to make me, as an audience member, interested. I go to conferences for two reasons - knowledge and networking. If you're up on stage and you're not being clearly labelled as a sponsor who is giving a sponsorship message, I'd really like it if I came away from your session having learned something new, or shown a new way of looking at something. 

Giving to your audience without asking in return

Of the three big conferences I've been to, the person who stands out the most for me in terms of giving knowledge to the audience without asking for anything in return, was Matt Biddulph. As CTO of Dopplr - before he became software designer and creative technologist for Nokia after they bought Dopplr in 2009 - I was witness to two fine talks in two consecutive years.

Photo Credit: Baploinkadoink (http://www.flickr.com/photos/baploinkadoink/1484228079/)

On both occasions, Matt's talks were completely different. In 2007, he spoke about getting the best out of third-party widgets on your site, and helping other sites when you offer widgets. In 2008, his talk was about messaging, about modern successful applications being a collection of small parts, loosely coupled, and about using n-tier mentality when designing apps, even when you're using a single server.

In both talks, he showed insight, delivered tips on good development practices, but most importantly he gave. Sure, he mentioned he was from Dopplr, and he explained what Dopplr was, but at no point during any of his talks did he try and sell you anything. More importantly, his 2008 talk was completely different to the one he'd given in 2007.

The problem of being a conference regular

To someone attending their first conference, everything is new - the experience, the speakers and the talks themselves. 

If you go to a lot of conferences, particularly in the same area and in the same few months, there's a good chance you'll see some familiar faces on stage. There's good reason for that - the ones that appear at multiple conferences are there because they have something to give: knowledge, a good message and passion about their topic.

The more conferences you go to, and the more thinly-veiled sales presentations you're coerced into sitting through, the more cynical you become. I took a year out of attending conferences last year. My reasons were mostly due to having constrained budgets, a trip to Australia and New Zealand, a wedding and a honeymoon, but for the conferences I could have attended, there was no reason for me to go back. In the majority of cases, I saw a worrying trend of similar subjects, similar talk titles, and a lot of the same people.

Let me be clear, however: I would happily sit in an audience and listen to Relly Annett-Baker talk about copywriting; Matt Biddulph about anything related to application architecture; Stuart Langridge, Remy Sharp or John Resig about anything related to JavaScript; Bruce Lawson about emerging web standards; and - in fact - anyone talk passionately about a subject that excites and intrigues them.

After all, isn't that one of the reasons you go to conferences?

Less of the same, please

In 2008 at FOWA, I saw Francisco Tolmasky demonstrate the Cappuccino framework and his company's 280 Slides application, built the aforementioned framework and "Objective-J". 280 Slides is, at it's core, a clone of Apple Keynote that works within a browser that will support it. I also recall Ryan Carson coming onto the stage shortly afterwards, proclaiming that 280 Slides was really the future of web apps. 

I remember how Microsoft tried to get the Visual Basic community building web apps using ASP.NET in the early days - drag and drop components, absolutely positioned onto an HTML document - and Objective-J and Cappuccino seem, to me, to be very similar to that approach. Tolmasky spoke with passion and knowledge about his product, but I didn't take much away from his presentations at FOWA because Atlas, Cappuccino and Objective-J strike me as technologies that just aren't relevant to me as a web developer.

His talk at FOWA 2009, which I didn't attend, was based around Atlas, his company's web-based development environment for Cappuccino apps. This year, he's back at FOWA, with another talk on how to write 'stunning' apps with less code. Sound familiar?

Please don't misunderstand me here - I'm fully aware that, as an invited speaker or expert in a particular topic, you're going to talk about the same subject. As I said above, I'll happily listen to a person talk about a subject that ignites them for hours on end, again and again, but delivering the same talk - or a talk which is only slightly different to your last one - at different conferences is, as far as I'm concerned, lazy. Sure, you may be talking to a different audience this year than last, but you've got to plan for some overlap between new and old attendees.

As someone paying to attend a conference, I expect - with reason, I hope you'll agree - that the talks I'm listening to will be informative, entertaining and, above all, original.

Honing your craft

The one exception to this rule, in my opinion, is where talks are given at grassroots and free conferences. If the speaker isn't being paid to attend, or is giving their time up for free, or if the event itself is organised by a grassroots organisation such as The Multipack, then a degree of repetition can be acceptable, giving the speaker a a chance to test out a new talk with a smaller, willing bunch of enthusiasts, some of who may be able to give constructive feedback.

Photo Credit: Andy Higgs

I'm grateful to have had the chance to hear Drew McLellan, Jon Hicks, Stuart Langridge, Bruce Lawson, Remy Sharp and Simon Collison (pictured above) talk about their subjects, all for free, thanks to the Multipack Presents and Geek in the Park events that I've been involved in, and I think more events like this will help up-and-coming speakers talk about what matters to them.

Giving people the opportunity to talk is what will make for greater conferences in the future, with fresh ideas from fresh people. I'd love to see an event whereby groups of established speakers team up with relative newbies - one pair per subject - to present a talk and chair a relaxed, discussion, very similar to some of the Multipack Presents events that have been held in the past, but with an opportunity to promote more speaking.

Don't judge a conference by it's speakers

But importantly, the quality of a conference can't be calculated solely on the speakers that are attending. I did some research on people who have spoken at some of the more established conferences since 2006 - dConstruct, Future of Web Apps, @media. When I looked at the line-ups for the upcoming conferences that I have the option of attending in the next six months, I checked to see who I've seen before or who I've no interest in seeing again.

When I used this method against FOWA London 2010, dConstruct 2010 and New Adventures in Web Design 2011, the results were as follows (where SB/NI means Seen Before or Not Interested):

Conference	SB/NI Rate
dConstruct 2010	0%
FOWA 2010	57%
New Adventures in Web Design 2011	9%

The raw speaker data is available as a Google Spreadsheet, which you're more than welcome to append to as time goes by. I simply looked at the speakers that I've seen before and the talks that I would not be interested in and tallied them together.

Of course, if I used this method alone, I'd be suggesting that seeing Matt Biddulph a second time would be a bad idea, but speakers such as Biddulph show that a good speaker will tailor new talks to his audience. God knows that there are conferences out there who bring out the 'big' names, like Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuck and Mike Arrington, but I'm not sure I'm bothered about hearing from that kind of internet celebrity anymore.

I've never attended a barcamp or an unconference, despite the fact that I'd very much like to be involved in one. I feel that the interaction between speaker and audience is one of the most important parts of learning, and a smaller number of speakers, with short, sharp presentations would allow for more interaction, and a better chance of taking something valuable away.

Simon Collison, who spoke at Geek in the Park last year, has created something a little different - the New Adventures conference, starting with New Adventures in Web Design in January 2011, and it looks like it could be exactly what I'm hankering for:

New Adventures... will be carefully curated; chock-full of integrity, opinion, and fresh content, with an emphasis on shaking things up and challenging convention. This event has inspiration, thinking, and intelligence at its core. It will encourage debate, enthuse, excite, ask questions, and look for real outcomes.

Simon Collison — New Adventures in Web Design

I'm sure that Colly will pull it off. His intention of working closely with the speakers and ensure that they're sticking to the principles of the conference will pay dividends, and given the price and location, I expect it will be a very popular event.

The proof of the pudding

I'm sincerely looking forward to both dConstruct and New Adventures in Web Design for different reasons. dConstruct has always attracted me but, until this year, I've never been able to attend. The type of talks and the fact that the talks are very much cross-discipline means I'm hoping to come away inspired in many different areas of my craft.

New Adventures excites me because it could turn the idea of the conference on its head - the format and the whole idea that the event will be curated makes me think it will address the problems with many of the conferences that I've outlined above. I really do wish Simon well with the event and look forward to being in Nottingham in January.

However, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, my attendance of multi-track super-conferences - like FOWA, @media and the like - has come to an end. Smaller events, focussed on a single theme, as opposed to being all-encompassing developer- or designer-only events, are where I'll be spending my time in the future.

Along with grassroots events, I expect they're also where I'll be finding the most value.

I was going to wait for the white ones to arrive, but my inner geek got the better of me this morning when I saw that the Stratford upon Avon O2 store had a new batch of iPhone 4 in stock.

This does, of course, mean that Bella has a new phone - my old 3GS, which is in perfect condition - and that a lucky member of my family will soon have an iPhone 3G which is also in excellent condition.

That, or I'll sell it.

I've been a big fan of Tweetie both on the Mac and on the iPhone, where it is now the official iPhone Twitter Client, for quite some time now. I paid for a license on the Mac, and I bought the premium version on the App Store for my phone.

Even at £1.79, I felt it was great value, and I'm sure many users agree with me. Now it's free, there's really no reason not to use it, especially so given that - since April 9th of this year - it's also the official client for the platform.

Sadly, that's probably why my satisfaction with the desktop version is beginning to wane.

Goodbye atebits, hello Twitter Inc.

Loren Brichter, the man behind atebits and Tweetie, is now part of Twitter's mobile team. Who can blame him? To all of those who dislike Loren for 'selling out': you'd have done exactly the same thing in his situation. That's the dream situation for any indie developer - to be snapped up.

Right now, his priorities have doubtless changed. We're told an iPad app is in the works, and despite many voices to the contrary, Loren insists that Tweetie 2.0 is coming for the Mac, even going so far as to say that he'll continue working on the app up to version 3.0.

However, I'm guessing that Twitter's management have made it quite clear that, as an employee, his top priorities are now Twitter for iPhone and iPad. Despite reports that Twitter employees love Tweetie for Mac, I imagine that the priorities for Tweetie for Mac are lower than his other projects.

Plenty of people believe that Tweetie has turned into vapourware and that, now he's part of Twitter Inc., it's increasingly unlikely that he'll release a newer version anytime soon.

For the record, I count myself among the optimists.

From optimism to frustration

The Twitter API continues to go from strength to strength. The retweet feature alone is one of my favourites. Some of the people I follow have a lot of interesting things to say - after all, why else would I follow them. Sadly, some of them suffer from bouts of retweetarrhea. Originally, this would mean a screenful of RT this and RT that - something that wasn't easily filtered.

These days, the official method of retweeting - which attributes the original content to the original author - is as simple as hitting the retweet button in supported clients, and seeing original tweets from their original authors in your timeline.

The only problem is that, right now, Tweetie's support of retweeting is limited to showing you the tweets in the old RT @user: fashion. Not great.

Lists is another great feature of Twitter - I can segregate a bunch of people who are not quite interesting enough to follow and put them into a list. All I need to then do is look at the list and view the tweets from those users. It's like TweetDeck's panes feature, but officially supported and very much a welcome addition.

As far as Tweetie's concerned though, lists don't exist. Neither does the ability to geo-tag your tweets. 

None of these features are easily accessible via the Tweetie desktop client, but for me, it's the absence of the correct implementation of Twitter's retweet API that I miss the most.

Still hopeful, but only just

Before Tweetie, I used Twitterrific from the IconFactory. I had a single Twitter account, and I kept up with a relatively small number of people - in the low tens. The application was simple to use, didn't get in the way, and did what I needed it to do. When I was on my Windows machine - back when I had a physical PC - I used to use TweetDeck, up until I noticed that whilst running it was taking up a sizeable chunk of my processing time.

I've been looking for a client to replace Tweetie for quite some time. The problem was exacerbated last week by various API changes and problems which resulted in both Tweetie and Twitterrific being unable to connect to the service or be of any real use:

To Tweetie's credit, even though there are many other clients out there, I haven't been able to get to grips with any of them. Despite it's flaws and lack of support for the newest features of the Twitter platform, I still consider it to be the best desktop client out there - but only just.

I understand Loren's choice to not give an indication of when Tweetie 2 is likely to arrive, but having some sort of dialogue with your users, letting them know what's being worked on, would be far better than leaving them in the dark.

Despite the fact that I find EchoFon just short of being a credible replacement, and Socialite being far too busy, if Tweetie 2 doesn't arrive soon, I can see myself learning to live with their differences and shortcomings and jumping ship to something new - especially if Twitter releases any more must-have features.