Please bear with me while I get it all sorted.

Thanks.

The Web Developers Conference is aimed at both professionals and students, and focuses on the front end side of web development.

The schedule has now been released, and the speakers have been known for a while, there are a couple of well-known speakers that will be there so I’m really looking forward to this and hopefully learning a few things front end related , as a PHP developer that’s where my skills aren’t so strong.

Tickets are still available at a very reasonable £50 for the days festivities, and will be entering a Late Bird stage at the start of October, so get your tickets now to avoid disappointment if they sell out or go past your budget! Various discount codes are floating around on Twitter if you need one, or just ask one of the speakers if you’re struggling.

You can find out more information on the conference website http://webdevconf.com/

PHPNW is a user group meetup of PHP developers based in Manchester, with the aim of sharing experiences and improving knowledge of all things PHP (and other related technologies). The group meet the first Tuesday of the month for a 40 min or so talk on the speakers chosen topic. They held their first conference in 2008 and have had one each year since. Find out more on the conference About page.

So Why should you attend?
2010 was my first PHPNW conference and as I said in my post at the time it was a great experience, I met a lot of new people, and learnt a lot of new tips, tricks and tools to help my PHP development. I have used them to improve the way I do things both at work and at home on personal projects so it was well worth the money and I had a great time.

This year, the conference is going to be bigger and better, with a new venue, more speakers, a new track, increased sessions on the 2nd day, a pre-conference tutorial day, an unconference, the list goes on. Its going to be an amazing couple of days and I learnt so much last year and am expecting this year to be no different. There are some really interesting sessions going on, am stuck with a couple of talks on which one Im going to go to. The good news is, which ever I decide, all the sessions are filmed so I will get to see all of them anyway after the conference is over and my post conference drinks related headache has subsided.

I really do recommend you clear the 8th and 9th of October from your diary, buy your ticket and pop down to Manchester for a great couple of days. If you do attend, don’t forget to say hi, and mines a Carlsberg

Now, enough of my waffling, down to the important bit. You have just 1 day left to get your Early Bird Tickets, before the price increases a little (not too much) in the final days run up to the conference weekend.

You can find out more information on the PHPNW11 conference website or by following and tweeting to the @PHPNW Twitter account.

This week, Google took that idea and extended it into an independent online tool, making it available for anyone on any browser. It uses a version of WebKit installed on a server to run the test (via the Chrome version of Page Speed Im guessing) to test your site and suggest improvements.

It seems to work in exactly the same way, and suggests the same kinds of things to improve your score, and has the same issues I pointed out last time, in that it marks you down for incorrect caching on Google Services you include on your page (Analytics in my case).

When I first ran the test on my site, I had dropped to 76/100, this was down to the javascript includes I had slowing things down, and the image caching wasn’t long enough. A couple of tweaks later and I’m now back up to 96/100 which is 3 above where I got to last year.

Read the Google post or start testing your site, please note tho, that as its being hosted on the Google Labs site, this could (as many have done before) disappear without warning. If it does I’ll update this post to reflect that.

CSS3: stay tuned for style – @chrisdavidmills

Typography online – @jake74

Adaptive layouts – @patrick_h_lauke

CSS3 for dynamic, responsive UIs – @13twelve

the first three may not be much use as without the talk the slides dont really help if you weren’t there, but they do contain links to other articles etc that you may find useful. The adaptive layouts talk was particularly interesting as we are going to have to start thinking about mobile devices in our designs/work.

The last link isn’t slides but an example site he used for his talk. It contains examples of what we can do with CSS3 in terms of transitions and animations.

The examples are best viewed in chrome especially the animations (in fact the animations only work in chrome), but as animations should be done with JavaScript not css that’s not really problem as we would never use it cross browser.

the strangest things found so far very curious indeed. Leading to the question Who is Dianne and does she like dancing?

This session is actually a repeat of the session they did with fellow Opera developer Bruce Lawson back in September, but luckily for me they decided to repeat it for those unable to make it first time round.

Bruce was unable to make it to this session, but Patrick more than made up for this be presenting valid arguments for why we should be incorporating HTML5 into our work, outlining the pitfalls and cross browser compatibility issues we have with using HTML5 today. He also quickly lead us through the new elements, api’s and showed lots of examples of what we will be able to do in the coming months.

Unfortunately for me, this session didn’t really teach me much, having watched Bruce Lawson present a similar talk at Disruptive code in September this served more as a refresher, but still very interesting and was good to talk to people afterwards and discuss things in more details with Patrick.

You can view the sides from the talk on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/redux/html5-and-friends-standardsnext-manchester-24112010-5908250

I recommend you also watch Bruce’s talk at the Disruptive Code conference: http://video.disruptivecode.com/video/840618/the-zen-of-html5-bruce

• http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html
• http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/
• https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/entry.do?code=060AD92489947D410D897474079C1477
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmobile/default.aspx
• http://developer.palm.com/

PHPNW have held two previous conferences but unfortunately due to other commitments I was unable to attend, which is why for this event I made the effort and made sure I was free to attend… and what a great decision that was!

I was a little unsure what to expect from the conference, but with three tracks to follow all with interesting subjects I knew it would be a good day. I wasn’t disappointed.

Rather than bore you with my thoughts, I’ll let you make your own mind up. I’ll list which talks I went to below but as PHPNW made the brilliant decision to film all their talks you can pop over to the schedule page on their website and watch them all yourself.

Conference Site: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw10/

The talks I went to were:

Keynote: Teach a Man to Fish: Coaching Development Teams – Lorna Mitchell
Track 1 @10:00

Geolocation and Maps with PHP – Derick Rethans
Track 2 @ 11:15

Debugging – Rules and Tools – Ian Barber
Track 1 @ 12:15

The Journey towards Continuous Integration – Sebastian Marek
Track 2 @ 14:00

Developing Easily Deployable PHP Applications – John Mertic
Track 1 @ 15:00

Database version control without pain – Harrie Verveer
Track 1 @ 16:15

Framework Shootout! – Marcus Deglos
Track 1 @ 17:15

There was also an informal second day, at the Museum of Science and Industry, which had some really good talks, some of which I think should have made it into the main event on the saturday.

All the talks I went to were really good, and I learnt a lot from them, and the bonus is I can re-watch the presentations on the PHPNW conference site, and catchup on the ones I missed

Looking forward to next year already, and if you didnt make it down, I highly recommend you do!

This is the story of a small green robot and a Manchester based PHP developer.

The Phone
The HTC Hero won award after award after its release, recived lots of wonderful reviews and celebrity endorsements. All of which were deserved. The phone pushed Android 1.5 to its limits and HTC’s Sense UI and support for Flash topped it off nicely and make it a great phone to use. The ability to browse the Internet as you would on your desktop is something I think is a crucial requirement from a phone today, the camera has a little to be desired but at 5.0 mega pixels it matched most phones of the day, the lack of a flash is a shame as it means pic’s in low light tend to not come out so well.  Hardware-wise the phone operates perfectly, its fast and responsive, has only crashed a handful of times since I got it (not bad for 12 months, my WinMo phone crashed a couple of times a month, but then what version of Windows doesn’t.. :p).

The Software
The Hero originally shipped Android 1.5, which was great (note the past tense), at the time of the Hero’s release in July 09 it was the latest and greatest.With HTC’s Sense UI  plopped on top, made it a beautiful phone to use. Android 1.5 had its flaws tho, there are a lot of bugs and missing features (admittedly Sense UI added a few back in), but it was still missing a lot of basic functionality that people expected from a mobile device, send/recieve over bluetooth anyone? not with Cupcake you dont. There were also a lot of problems with the browser when not in “mobile view”.

The Hero has since been updated to Android 2.1, unfortunately (for HTC and Orange UK) it came 8 months too late. We were originally promised an update to the Hero back in October 2009 via HTC’s Twitter feed but it took till July before HTC finally managed to push the update out the door. And took a further 6 weeks till the update was available to Orange customers. This resulted in me losing all confidence with both HTC and Orange to provide me the Android experience I was looking for. Yes HTC can provide the hardware, and Orange (occasionally) the network but as far as Android goes… they both fail miserably.

Luckily for me, and you too, there is a wonderful development community available for android, and many developers willing to donate time and energy into making an android experience worthy of the software itself. And back in June, I took the decision to void my warranty and root my Hero so I could flash a custom ROM. Im now running Android 2.2 (FroYo) on my Hero, whic HTC still wont admit is possible and will not be releasing. All thanks to the guys at VillainROM.

The Apps
There are so many apps available on the Android Market and I haven’t tried a fraction of them, but I’ve added a page with a list of the apps I use, If you know of an app that does the job better, please let me know.

The Android Market is still quite young compared to Apples iStore, it has a lot less apps and seems to be filling up with a lot of useless apps, but thats the price you have to pay for an open, unrestricted (to a degree) market place. It desperately needs a better way to search and manage applications, but this should be made a lot better once the website version launches later this year.

Android Development
A couple of months ago, I started building my own Android apps. Its been fun brushing up on my JAVA and learning a new “language” to work with the Android api’s. I’ll be posting another time on how to setup and build basic apps but in the meantime if you want to get started, I advise you buy Reto Meier‘s book, Professional Android 2 Application Development, its been a lifesaver for me and has taught me an awful lot about Android. Also read his blog as its packed with useful snippets and advice.

Most of my Android development is for work at UKFast, so Im not going to mention them but the ones I have created outside of work are available in the market under my developer name “gavtaylor”.

So after all this, how have I found my last year with Android?
Well the biggest lesson I’ve learnt that the future of android lies in the developer community, and the only way to experience Android as it was intended is to root and flash custom rom, unless manufacturers and carriers get better with the roll-out of updates, this will be the only way to ensure your phone is running the latest version of Android available.

The delays are mainly down to them implementing custom UI’s and adding branding, hopefully this will get better with Android 3.0 as rumours have it Gingerbread will come with theme support so it shouldn’t take as long for carriers to re-brand future updates. I still think manufacturers will take their time releasing new roms as they will no doubt continue to re-write parts of the framework to implement features not available in the stock ASOP build.

So… thats my year with Android. Joy… frustration… happiness… relief… but this was mostly caused due to Android being so young to start with and as an early adopter you have to expect it to be a bumpy ride at first. And if you were to ask would I do it again? I’s say Yes definitely…

Please feel free to add your thoughts/experiences with Android in the comments below.