Buy Tickets - Early Bird: £130, Full Price £155
The Highland Fling prides itself on exciting speakers and valuable topics that we can all learn from. Sound good? Whether you're a front-end whizz or a project manager wanting to find out a bit more about what your team could be getting up to, The Highland Fling 2011 - Back to Basics will take you on a journey through modern web development that you can't afford to miss.
You're starting your next project, looking at wireframes and designs. Inevitably, you’re thinking about which CSS framework you want to use, finding the jQuery plugins you need, and looking at web typography providers.
Do you need any of that right now? Chances are, you’re solving a problem that doesn’t need solving yet, whilst ignoring the real problem at hand.
A journey begins with a single step. Take that step, not the thousandth. After all, you'll get there soon enough.
Steve Marshall has always wanted to be a mighty pirate, swashbuckling his way around the Spanish Main. If he ever grows up, that’s what he’ll be. Until then, he works as a code–monkey and visionary or naysayer, as the need arises, for Yahoo!. Steve has worked on international TV listings sites, brochureware, military-grade standards-management tools, sites for burgeoning rock bands, award-winning intranet portals, and a whole host of things between.
When he’s not working or complaining on Twitter (under the ever-so-elusive pseudonym @SteveMarshall), he can be found listening to far more music (live and otherwise) than is probably healthy, playing videogames, taking more photos than he has time to process, or going very fast round corners in his car. One day, he might blog on http://nascentguruism.com/ again. One day.
The iPhone didn't just change the mobile landscape, it changed how designers thought about on-screen graphics. For years, web designers took some design cues from the world of print design: newspapers, magazines, flyers and posters.
Now it seems that the "Apple look" of realistic lighting, gradients, shadows, highlights and silhouetted symbol icons is crossing over from iPhone app interfaces to the web. Mike will go over the current trends in app user interface design and how they can be applied beautifully on the web as well.
Mike has been designing and developing for the web since the 90s and has worked on projects for Fortune 500 companies, startups, non-profits and the U.S. government. Since the iPhone came out, he’s been busy writing about & building apps for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
He’s the author of Beak, a Mac Twitter client that was downloaded by over 30,000 people and Digital Post for iPad, a virtual newspaper app that peaked at #4 in the News category in the iPad App Store. He’s the creator of Design Then Code, an iOS user interface design & development site and wrote Building iOS Apps From Scratch. He lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife Eleni and black lab Dora.
This session is for designers, by a developer, sharing his approach to taking a static design and making it a real living and interactive thing on the web.
How do you break a design into it's components, how do you quote for them, what's simple and what's complicated, where are the risk points? Do you use off-the-shelf plugins and libraries or do you build something bespoke? Remy Sharp will share his experience and approach to his process that bridges the hand over from interaction design, to interaction development.
Remy is the founder and curator of Full Frontal, the UK based JavaScript conference. He also runs jQuery for Designers, co-authored Introducing HTML5 (adding all the JavaScripty bits) and is one of the curators of HTML5Doctor.com.
Whilst he’s not writing articles or running and speaking at conferences, he runs his own development and training company in Brighton called Left Logic. Generally speaking, he’s about as crazy about JavaScript, HTML & CSS as a squirrel is about his nuts during the winter!
Ask on Twitter for advice on which content management system to choose and expect a barrage of different responses, all from people passionate about their favourite system. In this session Rachel Andrew will advise you how to assess your CMS requirements and select the best system for any particular job. We will also take a look at some specific tips and tricks that can help if you are designing for implementation into a CMS.
Rachel Andrew is a front and back-end web developer and Director of edgeofmyseat.com, a UK web development consultancy and the creators of the small content management system, Perch. She is the author of a number of web design and development books including CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks (3rd edition), published by SitePoint and also writes on her blog rachelandrew.co.uk. Rachel tries to encourage a common sense application of best practice and standards adoption in her own work and when writing about the web.
Confused about all this HTML5 malarkey? Struggling with the difference between article and section? Jack is here to dispel the mysteries surrounding these new techniques and will show you how you can start implementing HTML5 today.
Jack Osborne is a young, talented web designer, working in the award-winning Glasgow agency Good, where he specialises in building HTML5/CSS3 standards based websites.
After graduating from a Bsc Hons in Multimedia Technology at Glasgow Caledonian, Jack has been a prolific web designer and author. His work has been featured in the national press, and his articles for .net magazine retain a loyal following. Jack is also carrying the honourable title of HTML5 Doctor, having been involved in the influential web publication since its inception.
Jack has made a significant impact on the Scottish web design scene. He loves everything battered, and likes to refer to himself simply as ‘Osborne’.
Chris will be hosting the event and interviewing guests
Chris Heilmann has been around the block of web development and then some. Originally a radio journalist, audio producer and newscaster he found the internet as a media to support in the mid-90ies and worked on some large intranet projects before dabbling in ecommerce and banking. During the first .com bubble he lived in the States on large shop systems before coming back to the UK right after the big bang. There he worked for a large agency jumping from framework to framework and using all kind of enterprise CMS before joining Yahoo as lead frontend developer and later on lead evangelist for all matters web.
In December last year Chris joined Mozilla as principal evangelist for the open web and HTML5. Over the years Chris wrote several books, published numerous articles and spent most of his time in the recent years speaking at conferences with his finger on the pulse of the current web and his hands around the throat of bad, outdated practices.
Though the web has evolved a great deal in the last decade, the most basic aspects of accessible development have hardly changed at all. So to kick-off his talk, James will look at accessible techniques which have stood the test of time, being just as important today as they were a decade ago.
But the web is continually changing, and web-accessibility has had to change with it. To continue his talk, James will look at the most-recent developments in this area, focusing mainly on WAI ARIA — the standard for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, which makes it possible to use custom interface widgets with access technologies like screenreaders.
Then to finish his talk, James will ask: how do we pass-on our understanding of the needs and purpose of accessibility to the rest of our development team, to make sure it's treated as a core-requirement and not just bolted-on afterwards? And how do we make sure we remember ourselves, and not get distracted by the coolness of the latest shiny stuff‽
James Edwards (aka Brothercake) is a freelance web-developer based in the UK, specialising in advanced JavaScript programming, and accessible site and application development. With more than ten years’ professional experience in the field, he is a published author, a frequent blogger and speaker, and an outspoken advocate of standards-based development.
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The Highland Fling would like to thank the following sponsors for their support of the event. If you'd like to show your support for the conference and contribute to making it happen then we'd love to hear from you, get in touch with us and we can have a chat.
