On Monday I attended the Future of Web Design tour when it rolled into Glasgow and thoroughly enjoyed it. This one day event was held at the Glasgow Film Theatre, and featured a range of talks on subjects as diverse as microformats, Silverlight and keyboard accessibility all of which were enjoyable as well as introducing new ideas and techniques.
Drew McLellan opened proceedings with an explanation of microformats, and how they can be implemented into projects and the benefits that they bring. As Google are now beginning to index microformats then now is a good time to start implementing these into sites and is a simple technique to implement. Microformats use existing standards such as the hreview and vcard formats and can be added to sites in order to provide this information to the users. The main advantage of microformats to the web is that it provides context to the page and information which is contained within it, in turn providing more accurate and better quality search results. An easy way of identifying which sites make use of microformats is to use the Firefox plug-in Operator which displays a small green icon in the top right of the browser, and although they’re not widely used at the moment, they certainly will be in the not-so-distant future.
Up next was Mike Taulty from Microsoft who demonstrated and promoted the Silverlight and Expression Blend software, which whilst looking fairly impressive it seemed a bit “product placement” for the show and not something I can see myself using in the near future.
After Mike, Matt Gifford from Fuzzy Orange was up next to demonstrate the process of creating an Adobe AIR app, which wasn’t as scary or difficult as I thought it would have been. AIR apps can be built using a variety of languages including HTML, CSS, MXML and AJAX amongst others, and by using tools such as Flash, Dreamweaver, Flexbuilder and Flashbuilder.
It was a real insight into how to create a simple app using these technologies, and he created a small app which would play music tracks through a drag and drop interface in only a few minutes.
After some speed networking which I ended up taking part in, it was time for lunch before the afternoon sessions began.
A review of the afternoon sessions will be published tomorrow.
Photo thanks: Wee James & Carsonified
