Two busy days of intensive schedule. A few very inspirational talks to fill your creative batteries and some encouraging sessions that simply confirm you’re on the right track. Rivers of nearly 700 people crawling inside the Business Design Centre in Islington, London — in for the presentations and out to breathe some fresh air, grab a bite or light a cigarette — that’s in short what to expect from the largest web conference in Europe.

Sessions

Sessions were held in two tracks, so unfortunately one couldn’t catch up on everything.

I went to see more of the design-oriented talks, while Tomaš, our lead developer, was more interested in technical topics. Vanja (web.burza CEO) and Daniel (our personal paparazzo) visited a little bit of both.

The most inspiring presentation was Jon Hicks’ How to be a creative sponge, after which I couldn’t resist to photographing every single street sign and shop display on the way back to our appartment.

All other sessions were quite interesting, although not revolutionary. We were happy to get the confirmation that we were already following advices given as “best practice”, with one little exception — the eye-opening session High Performance Web Pages by Nate Koechley. At the conference, Nate offered 12 rules for speeding up your pages, but added two missing rules later on in his slides, which can be downloaded from his site.

Special thanks goes to Malarkey for mentioning Croatian design a few times in his presentation Royale with Cheese (slides can be found at his pages, under the events, right-hand column).

People met

Quite oddish, we mostly mingled with Croatian people while we were in London!

We met Danijela Nađ, the head of design at Croatian T-Portal. T-Portal is one of the top five most visited web sites in Croatia, and despite the fact that it’s under the roof of the local T-Com branch (the site is made with frames!), it’s nice to see that the guys behind it care about the standards and are trying to make it better. Baby steps, I guess…

The social aspect of the conference (soundly named @media Europe) was a little bit disappointing. There was a number of “closed” groups (for instance, The Brit Pack) that we did not approach because interrupting “internal” conversations is considered rude back from where I come from. Funny or sad, we had to introduce ourselves to a certain group of individuals for the second time now, but I guess that’s the way it goes when someone is a celebrity and you’re not…

Back in Februray at FOWA, the conference host Ryan Carson and his team made an extra effort it this area, which resulted in boosting a number of everyone’s industry connections. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the crew behind @media did everything to make the conference as successful as possible. After all — 700 attendees is not easy to handle. (Note to self: visit smaller conferences.)

Despite my ramblings not everything was so dark — we had a few nice little chats with Mr. Joe Clark (he is Canadian, so no wonder), whom we hopefully taught a few lessons about Croatian recent history, even though the man is a walking encyclopedia and you can hardly impress him… Joe briefly introduced me to Richard Ishida, the Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C, who was quite a pleasant company, too.

The highlight of the trip was finally meeting Rade Brujić (a.k.a. Medo), a long time online friend who was born and lives in London. Medo works for Kingston University London as a web designer/developer in a small, but dedicated web team which is behind some of the great Kingston University subdomains, like the recent International Conference: Excellence in Concrete Construction - through Innovation…

Anyway, Medo was our guide most of the time and thanks to him we spent three nice days hanging out in London’s restaurants and pubs. Hope to see you soon in Zagreb, buddy!

Off conference activities

We had a chance to take a walk around the central London, do some stunts at Traffalgar square and to visit the (unmarked) Abercrombie & Fitch store (where we almost left our life savings). All the cutest chicks work there, so if you are a tourist from Croatia wondering about the lack of cute British ladies on the streets of UK’s capital — the answer is: cuties have to work, too!

Addenum

Podcasts and presenatations from @media 2007. are available for download.

With Intel-based Macs, web developers now can test their pages in multiple operating systems and browsers with a single machine.

Virtualization software

Parallels is complete and stable, but a piece of software you will have to pay for. The price of 80 USD per license isn’t unacceptably high for an average web developer, but if you’re cutting your expenses, this might turn you down. In any case, you can download trial and evaluate if it’s worth the price. Anyway… from the version 3.0, the application supports 3D graphics and various USB devices, but it also has a set of supplementary tools, such as Transporter, which helps you migrate your existing Windows PC to a Parallels Virtual Machine. Parallels support bunch of OSes.

At the time of this writing, VMware Fusion is in its’ beta 4 version and is free to download. So far, it works pretty stable on my MacBook Pro, even in situations when both Vista + IE7 and XP + IE6 virtual machines are up. If you opt to use Fusion, there’s over 450 preconfigured virtual machines that can be found at Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Virtual PC can’t be run on Intel-based Mac, but if you’re on PowerPC, it will cost you 129 USD for standalone or 219 USD for VPC7 + Windows XP Home. VirtualPC for Windows is free. The advantage of VirtualPC are preconfigured time-bombed ISO images available from Microsoft. There are WindowsXP + IE6 and Windows XP + IE7 installations currently available and those will run till August 17, 2007.

Boot Camp is really not a virtualization application. What it does is lets you boot to either Mac OS or Windows installation and it is obvious that it’s impossible to test web pages in such an environment. Boot Camp will be shipped with Mac OS X Leopard, but until then, if you want to, you can download Boot Camp from Apple.com.

Operating Systems

We’re currently testing pages in the following virtual setups (note that besides virtualization app of your choice, you’ll probably have to purchase a license for each of your separate OS installations):

• Windows XP SP2 + IE6, Firefox 1.5.x and Opera 8.5
• Windows Vista + IE7, Firefox 2.x and Opera 9.x
• Suse 10 + Konqueror and Firefox

Browsers

Older browsers can be found at evolt.org, the latest at download.com. Opera keeps browser archive and so does Netscape. If needed, download Firefox 1.5.

What more to say? Have a happy cross-browser testing!

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is a great introductory book for every future web professional. Even if you already have a couple of web sites under your belt, you could still learn a bit or two.

Jason Beaird brings the overview of design basics. He covers the theory of layout, color, texture, typography and imagery, but not only that. The book explains the origins of some widely used terms, for example a comp. Not being a native English speaker, I used to think that this is short for (layout) composition, but it’s actually short for comprehensive artwork (or dummy). Another “A-ha” moment was the advice on pressing Alt + PrintScrn for taking a screen shot of the selected window in MS Windows.

I love how Jason explains things. For instance, he shows that the style is something easily accomplished by choosing an appropriate texture. And if you thought that repeating background patterns were unfortunate 1990’s trend, you’d be surprised to find that some of the leading industry creatives, for instance Veerle Pieters and Jason Santa Maria use them on their awarded personal sites. With his examples, the author teaches that in web design — the line between horrible and beautiful is sometimes very, very thin.

Still not sure? Read sample chapter.