PSNC Digital Libraries Team

The First Polish conference SparkUp 2010 about web design and web development was held 25th of May 2010 in Poznań. The Conference Program was divided into two separated paths – UX/Web Design and Web Development.

The First path, more theoretical and visionary, was about techniques and technologies in the context of creating usability of user interfaces. There were two excellent speakers in the subject – Andy Budd from Clearleft Ltd and Marek Kasperski from ThinkLab, co-author of book „Projektowanie stron www. Użyteczność w praktyce”. Listening to Marek lecture I have noticed a few things which would be very useful to implement in web applications of dMuseion and dLibra.
Next speakers showed the subject from a more technical point of view – there was a Remy Sharp (from LeftLogic), who had two presentations about jQuery (in that path from more a web designer approach) and Inayaili de León, excellent web designer, who spoke about bad practices in CSS.
For dessert we could listen to Antony Ribot (half-french,half-english and half-polish fellow) who talked about his experiences in designing UI for mobile solutions – which, for me, was surprising because of differences from normal web design.

The Second path, addressed more to programmers, started the official web evangelist of Opera Software – Bruce Lawson, who by the presentation „Web Development 2.0”, in very interesting and funny way, showed new approaches and perspectives of web development with the HTML 5 and the CSS3. Among other speakers were: already mentioned Remy Sharp, who presented more cool and advanced features of jQuery in lecture „jQuery: write less do more”, Bartek Zass from Microsoft who talked about Silverlight and Matt Biddulph from Nokia, who fascinated listeners with solutions of modern mobile phones.
One of the lectures was presented by Piotr Czekała from INSYS (responsible for organization of the conference) about the optimization techniques of frontend, which reminded programmers about the duty to reduce number of HTTP requests, compression of image data and optimization of frontend scripts. It was second thing mentioned on the conference, which we are planning to investigate and possibly implement in the web application of dLibra and dMuseion.

Although I have noticed the absence of one big gamer – Adobe (with Flash and possibly Flex), in the end I left the conference quite pleased, with a feeling of time well spent. Place of the conference – Congress-Teaching Center of Medical University was great as well as the food, after party and all.
Judging from a number of participants, SparkUp was successful and we can expect next one in 2011 – this time, two days perhaps.