As Katrina discusses there was a lot of sexist comments from the audience and speakers on the podium. Personally I didn’t find the Nectarine adverts (case in point the Coldfusion one) offensive. As I took it in context of the 1950’s extreme stereotype that it projected.

However comments about people at the conference and other female attendees to me was just as disgusting. It was the level and type of sexism that would not be tolerated in a professional workplace. So why should it be tolerated at a professional web industry conference. The talk at the bar or later in the evenings is not what I’m discussing here. I’m not going to repeat the comments as I don’t want to embarrass the people they were directed towards.

It turned me off. To the point where I just couldn’t be bothered talking with some male colleagues at the conference (unless I knew them from before). Hence I think I may have over hassled any non-male at the conference a bit. Sorry if I did. I’m generally a social person I like to meet new people and talk. I feel very sorry for anyone that was offended by some of the comments, all I can say is that not all people at the conference where there for a geek testosterone fest.

I’ve said this before, but I also noted out of the wide range of talent (gender aside) only one female speaker could be found. This was frankly disgusting. I know there are a few star ColdFusion / Flex / and Flash non male gurus in Australia and New Zealand. Seems no one bothered to approach them that I know of.

(Edit – Clarfication : The Conference is not disgusting,  it’s the state of affairs, one female speaker,  surely the community can come up with more than that.  Come on stop leaving it to the organisers.)

Well we can’t change the attendees attitude, but we can change the environment and the presentation of what is cool by the industry leaders promoting the right attitude. We need the “Web Rock Gods” to lead the way on this one.

I know a lot of conferences run with a code of conduct, and at the speaker briefs (before the conference) they ensure people know what is acceptable and what is not. Forcing some speakers to redo slides or entire talks. This should be adopted across the board in the web industry

In answer to the criticism of the Webjam. Okay this is like web-geek open mic at the pub. The organisers have no idea what they are going to get. And to vet them would be unfair. The only way to stop some of the sexism at the webjam is to change the attitude in general.

So again I put out the call, what would help women attend these events.

Update: Kay Smoljak, veteran MXer has her say on the topic. With an interesting conclusion.

Technorati Tags: sexism, webdu, conference, adobe, webjam, women-issues

Day Two

• The keynote, Ted Patrick showed off the next generation of Flex and its CS3 integration, seeing this I think I’m finally getting it as to where I can use Flex. Tim Buntel ran through some more Scorpio (Coldfusion 8.0) goodness.
• Now I had a three-way conflict. Go see Cameron Adams and Russ Weakley show people the correct way code (nothing new there). Listen to Caleb Adam Haye pull Yahoo APIs into Flash. Or see Charlie Arehart empart this rapid overview of ColdFusion Caching (it’s C-A-ching Charlie not Ca-S-hing). I opted for Charlie. The range of caching options for Coldfusion that he presented blew me away.
• Urgent work pulled me away from WebDU, so I missed Jesse Warden Flash Lite talk. Which is a shame. Hoping for the podcast goodness later to fill the void on this one.
• Okay got to see the workflow from CS3. Thankyou Greg Rewis. Yes, it’s going to be good, yes Fireworks is the optimisation Engine, Yes Dreamweaver and Photoshop can be tightly coupled. Finally I got to find out what has been bugging me for a while with Spry. Greg revealed later the Spry (Ajax) Javascript in Dreamweaver isn’t that accessibility friendly or unobtrusive. So again we all still have a job fixing the output from Dreamweaver.
• More Scorpio, interface and tags for rapid developments from Tim Buntel, working with Breeze like presentations, PDFs and images. Interesting, but by this stage I was getting a little tired of the Adobe demos.
• Speaker Roundtable, the usual let’s see the Adobe dudes avoid the hard questions. I would have preferred the non-Adobe people on the stage for a general panel. But we got more Adobe.

The Wrap

On a side note, was there a lot of twittering, well no! I was asked countless times, what was Twitter. Maybe Twitter was just not in the mindset of these web geeks. Sure some Adobe dudes are TWI. Some people get it. Some do not.

WebDU is slated as “A rock concert for geeks”. Well it had is share of Adobe “Web Rock Gods”, and the lower profile “Web Rock Gods” where the real stars as far as I’m concerned. The Adobe crew were interesting, but frankly they where all glossed in a little “sales” gleam. When it was people like Brandy Fortune (power to you Brandy), Kai König, Jesse Warden, Charlie Arehart, Caleb Adam Haye and Dmitry Baranovskiy, these are the people using the technology they are the real stars, the real people with real stories, no sales, no pitch, no NDAs. WebDU needs to enlist more of these types of speakers. Sure have a few of Adobe crew, but it would be nice to have less of sales pitch and more of the real “Web Rock Gods”.

Was it “A rock concert for geeks”, well frankly, no!

Let me explain. I’m sitting here in the hotel, flying out tomorrow, and I have this distinct feeling that I have been cheated. It’s like I have only just seen the support act, and missed the headlining band. I felt the hype, I felt the start of the adrenalin boost, being energised, feeling like I can take on the world. But as the last item on the agenda wound down, the session of community and all the hype just evaporated, leaving me with a feeling of regret, like I was just missing something.

Technorati Tags: ColdFusion, WebDU, WebDU2007, Flex, Scorpio, adobe, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, CS3, SEO, Flash, Spry, Javascript, KathandKim, Twitter, FlashLite

The Day

• All credit to the guys at Nectarine for the Flash based adverts, they where totally awesome.
• The day started with the usual keynote, with the two Mikes, Mike Downey and Mike Chambers dishing up some Apollo goodness. With the alpha of this product slated for release any day now this was a little of a sales pitch and a show and tell. That’s not to say it wasn’t interesting.
• Brandy Fortune led us into the world of usability. The one thing that I found refreshing about Brandy was her frank and honest approach as she discussed the methods, equipment and overview of a generalised “How to” on usability testing from an Information Architects view point.
• FarCry 4 was next on the agenda, Jeff Coughlin demonstrated the extreme power of the FarCry Formtools. It was interesting, would love to get the chance to inplement a FryCry site or at least be involved with the roll out of one. The power and easy of use of FryCry 4 is a few leagues higher than the previous versions.
• Kai König mainly bitched about web services and demonstrated the hype verse reality. It was good to see someone telling it like it is for a change. In summary soon as you step outside of the Coldfusion / Flex / Flash camp for web services and for example put .Net into the mix, you are basically asking for trouble.
• Had to go support Dmitry Baranovskiy with his presentation of Microformats, as you do. It was interesting watching people around the room realise the power of Microformats as Dmitry demonstrated there potential.
• There was a closed door, demo of the Adobe CS3 suite. This required the signing of an NDA, I hate NDAs, and especially to the level of detail in this one. Hence I opted for the SEO discussion from Jon Henshaw. Jon didn’t present anything really new, but he did make the a number of clarifications on techniques, that some people in the SEO segment of the Web Industry would not discuss in detail.

The Wii

Okay I played the Wii, yes it is addictive, and yes it is fun, especially on the large screen. It did prove I’m hopeless at tennis in real world and on the Wii. Now bowling, that’s a problem, having been a reasonability good league ten-pin bowler for years (in a previous life), I found it hard to make the transition to the Wii.

The Jam

Lachlan “Mr LachStock” Hardy led an in-conference webjam, this was my first on hand experience of the webjam format, it’s fast it’s furious, and it’s pure geeky fun. Did this go off, oh yeah this went off, big time. I suspect the webjam may infact outshine the banquet when all is said and done. Hats off to Lachlan. Minor gripes out of Lachlan’s control the “pillar” in the middle of the room and the very flaky Internet connection. I also got to finally meet Lisa Herrod for the first time, fate had really stop us meeting up before.

Tonight is the Banquet and a “private” Microsoft party afterward. I know this is going to be messy.

Technorati Tags: ColdFusion, WebDU, WebDU2007, Flex, Scorpio, Adobe, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, CS3, SEO, Flash, Webjam, Farcry, Wii, WebJamming, Microformats, Usability

First up after a stroll up towards the Bridge end of Sydney, there was a solid day of having Flex downloaded into my head, you know the drill, unscrew top of your head, pour in Flex, mix, re-screw on top of your head, thankyou James Talbot (from Adobe) for the massive headlong push into the world of Flex. I’ll be looking into Flex some more.

After the Flex Workshop, it was time to have the National Adobe User Group. Time to hear lots of empty promises from Adobe. Well I was I little surprised in the question and answer session it has basically all ex macromedia people and frankly for a change they where telling it like it is, no crap, no lies no fluff. Which for once was refreshing.

At the National Adobe User Group, Tim Buntel had a micro presentation on Scorpio (Coldfusion 8), nothing I suspect that we didn’t already know about. We’ll get more on this later at WebDU. The interesting highlights where:

• The ability to create PDFs on demand
• Image manipulation (about time too)
• The ability to create Breeze like presentation on demand
• A Rich Text Editor leverage from the use on one tag.
• Acceptance of output from PDF forms into Coldfusion
• Minor improvements to cfscript

The Rich Text Editor is of interest to me, as it’s leveraging the same RTE that I would use anyway, (usual javascript based RTE). It will have the various features turn off or on for the editor’s toolbar etc, and will allow support for the control of the HTML output, usual SDK for this editor, but bundled into the expected Coldfusion style tag. The real shocker was the demo. Well Tim shows the RTE and its output text that is now wrapped in a paragraph and font tag. Yeap we are rocking like it’s 1999. With a bunch of base HTML code output that just isn’t cutting the standards compliance. WTF! Adobe please get with the party. Use standards, we are trying to build a better web. This little black duck is going to be having words on this one, I can tell you.

Well I have the registration pack. Average bag (like I really need another one!), but the one major oversight is the program booklet, there is no list of the program agenda, no easy reference to what is next on the day and where. Okay if you couldn’t get it into the booklet (printer deadlines and all that), at least have a card printed for the lanyard.

Technorati Tags: ColdFusion, WebDU, WebDU2007, Flex, Scorpio, adobe, usergroup, Richtext, CSS, FontTag, TimBuntel, JamesTalbot

There is the usual panels, presentations etc, Adobe thinly veiled selling sessions – hope I’m wrong on this one. Geoff Bowers and Julie Steadman have certainly done a great job at filling the conference program out with four streams. That many sessions that I think I’ll have to be cloned to take in all the ones I want to do to. One minor criticism, where are the women. Sigh! Is Kay Smoljak right in saying (various times in various places) there are not a lot of women as developers / coders and the server side end of the web is dominated by males.

One of the programmed highlights for me will be the webjamming. The usual 3 minutes to strut your stuff. Now given the standards that have come out off Sydney locally over the last two webjams the quality at this event is going to have a high degree of intimidation factor with it. As I write this I note that there are only 8 of the possible 16 slots filled. Is Geoff holding some back, or are we falling short.

Frankly given the output of the last webjam, and the degree of work that went into the applications etc from Earle Castledine, Cameron Adams, Andrew Krespanis and Tim Lucas. I’m not surprised that people haven’t been fronting up. I know Lachlan Hardy has been trying to get people to front up.

Question is are we upping the anti too much at the webjams (videos available too). Or is there a sustainable degree of the talent out there in the web community, and a webjam is the perfect place for would be “Web Rock Godlings” to strut their stuff.

Have I had the time to put together something… well not likely? Rotating my neck the wrong way last week, put a stop to that! Mind you I do have a few ideas, just no time to implement them, as usual. And I could do a filler slot, but jamming wise it’ll be … well, I’ll leave that till later, if it happens.

Still I’m ramped up for WebDU. Reality is the program is really secondary to the people and the non-programmed events. Bring it on!

Technorati Tags: ColdFusion, Flex, WebDU, WebDu07, Conference, webjam, webjamming

Is it me or are we being bombarded with conferences at the moment. Last year I counted 14 web related conferences around Australia and New Zealand I could have attended, let alone the ones overseas.

I have recently (in last 4 years) attended :

• A usability conference/workshop, that I didn’t agree with at all. Don’t get me started on the “why I think Nielsen is outdated soapbox”.
• A FlashForward, that was great fun, but way too short.
• A few local and national ACS conferences, now they where a waste of time, those guys just don’t get the web.
• Then there was the intensive Austalian IA conference OZIA 2006.
• And the amazing Web Directions 2006.

But I have never been to a developer conference like the MXDU (Macromedia developer conference) series.

Well this year it changes, its already all booked, I’m going to WebDU 2007. WebDU (22–23 March 2007 in Sydney, Australia) is bascialy a local Adobe developer conference for Australia and New Zealand, its put together by Daemon Internet Consultants. I would have gone in 2006, but client demands stopped that one happening, same as they did in 2005 with WE05.

Like I said never really done a developer conference before. Now I don’t expect the level of networking and mad social conference adrenalin that Web Directions 2006 or FlashForward produced. In fact I’m not real sure what to expect.

The blurp goes…

…webDU will now to encompass a larger spectrum of web technologies and will bring you the best of web technologies, ideas and what the future holds and with and with a bevy of top class international and Australian speakers on the agenda….

WebDU07 is slated as basically a Flex, Flash and ColdFusion developers conference. One thing I do note with trepidation is that the program seems to be almost flooded with Flex. Now I’m not a Flex fan. I can see its place, but I would prefer unobtrusive Ajax instead of Flex any day. One thing of note, for me, is the focus on Flashlite on the mobile platform, now this product has matured a bit and it maybe worth taking a look at. I would have liked a lot more Coldfusion, a debate on the frameworks on offer, a preview the next version of Coldfusion maybe, a future direction!

So if you see me there come up say hi, I’m the one with the zimmer frame (only joking).

Technorati Tags: flex, coldfusion, webdu, mxdu, webdu2007