It has been my pleasure to be attending the WebDU Conference in Sydney this week. And what an awesome week it was!
WebDU is a great conference that has now been going on for about 9 years organised by the Daemon(ites) from Daemon Internet Consultants and I think it is THE Web Conference to go to on this side of the world.
WebDU was held at the lovely Four Points by Sheraton hotel right by Darling Harbour in Sydney. The rooms were nicely presented and fairly comfortable. Having said that, they were OK, not amazing in anyway, but hell, what are you doing in your room at a conference??.
Before the conference started, the hotel already provides free wifi in the lobby, but strangely not in the rooms, so I had to get a USB to Ethernet connector for my MacBook Air (forgot about that one, DOH!) and a steep AU$25 per day if you wanted to get a connection going in your room.
Aside from that, the massive main room and location of the conference itself was fantastic.
One of the main topics of complaint in most conferences is the food, but I have to say that WebDU cannot be faulted, even including a "hangover breakfast" on the second day (hamburgers and redbull). Attention to detail goes a long way indeed!
Keynotes, Sessions and Round Table
The first day keynote was a range of presentations showing the power of the Flash platform (I missed the name of the guys that presented it, sorry, I blame the Jet-Lag rather than my senility) in games as well as mobile development. Terry Ryan and Greg Rewis were unable to make the conference due to United Airlines cancelling a flight (#unitedfail) but Paul Burnett took over duties of MC.
For the first day I didn't manage to catch many sessions as I was busy preparing (or more like, localising) my presentation for later that day but I managed to catch a few sessions on the second day:
Keynote: Focus: It's hard, because... hey look at that over there!
The keynote was run by Mick Liubinskas from Pollenizer. Which was a great motivational presentation about focusing your attention and feature sets of your application or business. Too many things can distract you, including yourself and instead of just getting your project/business/enterprise out of the door, you can fail to focus on what is important.
Photoshop for Developers: From Fumbler to Master
This interesting session by Mike McHugh was a bit of a variety, since he demoed the new Photoshop API that allows external devices such iPads and iPhones (and other mobile devices) to connect and share with a running instance of Photoshop so you can run your own programs, share images and control palettes if you need to. The rest of the session focused on some really good tips for common tasks and he showed the *right* or rather the easiest way to accomplish them.
10 ways to fail at Agile
I loved this session by Sandy Mamoli. It started out with 10 topics, but of course, it had to be reduced in "features" due to time constraints, a perfect example of the pragmatic approach of Agile methodology.
Zero to App in 60 Seconds: jQuery Mobile & Phonegap
Paul Burnett Showed off some of the awesome features of the upcoming Dreamweaver 5.5 to develop mobile applications with PhoneGap and JQuery Mobile. Despite the title, it took slightly longer to build the Android application (because of compile times), so I think he should have gone with compiling the application to iOS instead!
Slowly I turned: Coding Location-Based Services Another awesome mobile presentation on using location based services using Flex and other technologies, most awesomely presented by Andrew Muller. Lots of ideas come out of this which I shall blog a bit later, but this was a must-have presentation if you are into location based services!
Roundtable
As the closing section there was a round table presented by Robin Hilliard, Tim Buntel, Sandy Mamoli, Dale Rankine and Renaun Erickson, some interesting questions including the infamous "innovation (full stop)" question.
Ballon
Interestingly over the course of the conference, the back channel chat (i.e. twitter feeds) was managed and displayed using an application called Balloon which allowed Geoff Bowers (the organiser of WebDU) to display all the relevant twitter feeds, display questionnaires and highlight specific tweets up on the main screens. Very impressive!
Geoff Bowers really knows how to treat the delegates as well as the speakers of he conference, and the speaker after-party was most awesome on the Saturday night (thanks for the invite!)
I think this conference was most awesome, and I look forward to next time, which I hopefully will be able to attend again! Thanks again to all the team and all the pople I met over in Sydney!
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