Google calendar mobile is a really useful mobile web app that enables people to quickly add events using natural language like “Dental appointment at Oxford House on 26th April 2012 at 3pm”.

Here’s what it looks like. As you can see, rather than presenting a typical high-level calendar view, it presents the day view for the current date or the next day that has some appointments.

When it comes to finding out if one is free for an appointment on a specific date in the distant future there is a massive problem. It is really difficult to goto a specific date to see if you have any appointments that might conflict with a proposed date and time.

It seems really strange that Google provides a service without a search facility! Sure, I can browse to events by paging through next and previous links but this is only useful if I want to check if I’m free in the near future. It’s somewhat tedious, time consuming and impractical to paginate thorough endless pages to get to a date one year hence to check availability for a dental appointment.

To fix this I suggest Google add a “Check availability” button that accepts the same natural language ad the “Add event” button. So I could type “26 April 2012″ and it would have a look and say “No appointments on the 26th April” followed by the Add event button. Or it would list all the appointments on that day if there were any. This would make an already useful app even more useful and remove the requirement to jump through endless hoops to sync Google Calendar with my phone’s calendar.

In fact on the day of the conference itself I was struggling to breathe properly and ended up leaving early, missing the final two speakers entirely. This wasn’t a massive issue for me at the time as I’d seen Andy Clarke speak plenty of times before and had seen Brendan Dawes at last year’s Future of Web Design in London. Plenty of other attendees cite Andy and Brendan as the highlights of the day but I came away with my own highlights from a stack of great speakers.

For me, Greg Wood’s talk on Art Direction and Editorial Design on the web was the one that fascinated me the most. Greg had undertaken a small research study to discover how people engaged with his content in the standard blog template format versus an art directed version with graphics and textual treatments.

His presentation was all about his findings and his inspiration. I wish I could link to the slides from his talk but I’ve yet to locate them. If you visit his website you’ll get the general idea though as he art directs all the articles too. I remember Jason Santa-Maria introducing the approach at @media a few years back. If you’ve got the talent and time to put this kind of effort into your articles then it certainly seems to pay off. I’d not seen Greg speak before, I’m not sure he’s done much of it, but he was entertaining and told a good story.

All the other presentations were of a very high standard. I think I took away at least one useful point from each of them. Colly put on great event that felt intimate, friendly and somehow quite unique and set apart from the the more established industry gigs. It has a little of the vibe of the first, single track @media from 2005. The attention to detail was second to none. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to organise an event of such scale and produce a well considered accompanying newspaper to take away.

Travelling up to Nottingham made a nice change from London. I managed to meet a few new people and catch up with some old faces. I just wish I was in better health at the time so I could make the best out of the day. I got the impression that this wasn’t going to be the first and last such event though. Maybe I’ll see you there next year?

A few years later I guess I became a little more self aware. Who really cared about what I’ve had to say? The posts dropped away and by 2009 they were down to a mere trickle. I lost the passion. Or maybe having a couple of kids wiped the energy. I’m not entirely sure. Recently I read something from Jeremy Keith (I can’t remember exactly what it was) that reminded me that, regardless of the fact that his journal is a massively enlightening read, he really only publishes articles for his own enjoyment.

Wonderful thing catharsis. my brain has a couple of years of jumbled up thinking to pour onto this slate. So, along with a redesign to illustrate my thoroughly up to date web skills, I plan to write the odd article or two about what I’ve learnt, where I’ve been and who I’ve been with. If I don’t, be sure to give me a poke.

Despite this move toward a more intuitive and user friendly experience Drupal will always be a complex beast to wrestle with. This is inevitable since it offers so much functionality drives such a wide range of websites. Perfect timing then to be sent the book: Drupal 7 First Look. The book covers all the new features and improvements. There’s plenty of focus on the theme API changes which are of specific interest to me. I can’t wait to see if the developers have dealt with some of my gripes about the lack of control of (some of) the HTML Drupal spews out.

I like to spend a bit of time absorbing the content of new technical books like this so expect the review in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime you can download a sample chapter PDF for yourself.

Mark illustrates each of his points with a case study from his own vast portfolio and other examples from the web and print. Be it the enormous task of redesigning the Drupal community or the De Standard newspaper websites to the time he spent designing endless tables of printed data in his early career. The book has bags of personality and really does fill a void in my bookcase that has been begging to be filled for some years.

Mark self-published his book and the attention to detail cross the entire process shines through. The enclosed postcards show us that this is the first in a series of five simple steps books and the handwritten compliment slip really added to the whole experience. Even the box it was delivered in showed that ever ounce of the design had been poured over for unending hours. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Buy Five Simple Steps, A practical guide to designing for the web direct from Mark Boulton Design LTD for £29 or get the PDF for £12.

The workshop was a first for Headscape who are better known for the Boagworld web design podcast. Paul Boag is a well known speaker in the user-centred web design field. As well as hosting Boagworld he also regularly presents at conferences world-wide. I had last seen him speak at @media 2008 and was pretty familiar with his style of delivery. Chris Scott , Headscape’s MD also presented a session at the start of the second day bringing a little bit of variety to proceedings. All the while 80s pop-star and Paul’s podcast sidekick, Marcus Lillingtonwas taking copious notes.

This was not the type of workshop where attendees are encouraged to partake in group activities involving flipchart paper, marker pens and stickies. Paul and his colleague Chris to delivered four presentations whereby delegates were invited to comment from our own perspective along the way.

Day one began with lunch and then two workshop sessions. Then we went back to the hotel, had a few drinks, a very tasty meal and ample opportunity for networking. The second day started early with the concluding two workshop sessions before ending with lunch and then home. So, effectively just one day of workshop spread over two days. I’d not encountered this format before but I think it really worked quite well.

I found it really useful to get a perspective on how traditional universities were dealing with the same issues that offer daily challenges to the distance learning institution, The Open University, where I work. Other delegates were from Bath, Keele, Strathclyde, Oxford, Exeter, Aberdeen, Edge Hill and City university. Some of these people were Headscape clients and others, including myself, were not.

Most useful to me was the first session on becoming a user-centred institution. Although we undertake usability testing and focus groups as a matter of course, there is still a lot more we could be doing at the Open University to ensure a consistent and meaningful user experience. Paul offered a few techniques that I’d not really considered before such as opposing traits and flash tests. He also offered some useful advice on constructing a good usability report.

The other sessions were also very interesting. I discovered that many academic institutions are opting for the Terminal Four content management system. I’d never even heard of it! I liked the web writing session, especially the idea that an institution should have it’s own personality and it should be possible to create a ‘persona’ for the university. We have brand guidelines but nothing as specific as doing that. I wonder if it would even be achievable across the plethora of sites and services across the Open University. I think the Headscape team were quite taken aback when they discovered the breadth and depth or web-based services within our institution. Particularly poignant was the issue of disability. The Open University has upward of 10,000 students who admit to a disability. We simply cant pay lip-service to accessibility. Because a great deal of our offering is online and our large number of students it cant be a case of fixing things to be accessible as and when students complain about them!

It was great to have the opportunity to discuss common problems and issues during lunch and other breaks. Headscape scheduled the workshop to break over two days with an overnight stay at a rather swanky hotel in Romsey. Headscape HQ is located in a tasteful barn conversion deep in rural Hampshire, a nice change from the bustle of a big city.

I do think that they went over and above the call of duty by providing a taxi service from Southampton airport to the venue. Also the hotel wasn’t the usual Travelodge fair either. People working in Universities are not accustomed to staying in what amounted to a rather swish boutique hotel with a nouveau cuisine three course meal. Workshop, meals, hotel and taxi for an inclusive cost of less that £300. All of which gave the impression that Headscape, despite this being their first workshop, were something special. Paul, Marcus and Chris are three very likeable chaps who I’m hoping we’ll get the opportunity to collaborate with in the near future.

For those who attended the workshop, I mentioned that the Open University was involved in a range of interesting social networking activity at the moment. Here are the links to the things I mentioned:

• Platform
• Open University on Facebook, YouTube, iTunes and Twitter
• Open University staff on Twitter
• SocialLearn — just hype right now but I’m promised that it will do something later in the year. They also have a SocialLearn blog.
• A few notable and relevant OU bloggers: Tony Hirst, Stuart Brown, Liam Green-Hughes, Laura Dewis, Martin Weller
• Knowledge Network
• Cloudworks (about to get a design overhaul)

It turns out that Flickr users can prevent their photos from appearing in public areas by activating a setting in their Flickr preferences. This means that their photos will no longer appear in the public time-line or under the various ways of browsing people’s photos (by tag, by date, by location). However, plenty of photographers are looking to make money from their photos and as such would not get the desired exposure if their photos were hidden from public view. It seems that such photographers are keen that their photos are available on the Flickr public areas but not via third-party websites. There is no setting within Flickr to accommodate this requirement.

I put a lot of photos on Flickr myself. But I’m not a professional photographer. I have no intention of selling my pics and can’t imagine anybody would actually want to buy them anyway. I’ve had a few requests here and there from various organisations who want to use my photos (Southampton Football Club and Buckingham Floods being two recent examples). I happily let them use the pictures with the usual “as long as you give me credit” caveat. But I don’t make a living from photography. I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps Flickr isn’t the right place for pros to set up shop. But what are the alternatives?

Firstly, I’m a web designer, not a developer. Scripting scares me. I’m really out of my comfort zone when I need to bring a web page to life with things like Flash Action Scripting or, in this case, Javascript.

Secondly, I’m a fairly practical kind of bloke who would rather just get something done as a proof of concept and work out how to improve it later. I don’t want to learn a language like PHP or Javascript from the ground-up before I can do something like tab interfaces, resizable boxes and drag and drop widgets. So I never have.

The jQuery User Interface (UI) Library is preceisely the kind of thing that I need in order to rapidly prototype web interfaces. It’s a set of well tested widgets, compatible with all modern browsers (and some old ones).

This book explains in great detail, with full code examples, how to quickly get cracking with every part of the library. This includes tabs, accordions, pop-ups, sliders, date pickers, auto-complete, drag and drop, resizing, selecting, sorting and various animations.

What I most enjoyed about this book was the rapid pace that Wellman moved me through each of the widgets. First he explains the purpose of the widget followed by the default implementation, how to style of ‘skin’ the widget to your own requirements and then onto the more intricate details of chaning how it behaves. This kind of approach is very accessible to me.

As a designer I’m quite interested in making the widgets fit the look and feel of my design. It’s rare that I ever want to use the default style and if it’s not easy to change the chances are I’ll look elsewhere. Each and every jQuery UI widget can be styled to exacting requirments and Wellman is keen to highlight this fact.

I get the feeling I’ll be frequently referring to the chapters on tabs, dialogues, resizing, selecting and sorting the in my day to day work. This is the kind of book you can confidently dip into when you have a specific problem to solve and one that will be a valuable addition to and web design bookshelf.

jQuery UI 1.6 by Dan Wellman is published by Packt Publishing and is £27.99

Read a sample chapter or buy the book direct from Packt Publishing.

Yet javascript opens up a world of exciting behavioural options to us. It enables us to bring our pages to life with all the wizzy and cool stuff that clients love. Things swishing in and out of view, dropping down, sliding, expanding and contracting. Javascript brings our flat designs to life. But it’s difficult. That’s one reason why jQuery was invented — to make life easier for web designers. If you’ve already mastered HTML and CSS then you’ll find jQuery a logical next step. It uses a similar code style to CSS rather than the all out alien language of raw javascript. Learning jQuery 1.3 from Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) is the only book you’ll need to get started with the library if like me you’re a web design who wants to add a little extra umph to your designs.

You’ll realise that this is definitive tome when you see that it contains a glowing foreword by John Resig, the creator of jQuery. He praises the authors, who he knows personally and gives Karl Sedberg a particular thumbs-up for his excellent knack for the English language. Indeed the themes in this book are relayed to the reader in accessible chunks of to-the-point tutorial that will immediately have you eager to boot up your PC and get cracking with showing and hiding, fading, bringing content into the page by the power of AJAX, sorting tables and all manner of glittering delights that were hitherto beyond your mortal reach.

I was in the process of building a new website using the usual solid webstandards that have kept me in work with my current employer for the last seven years when this book landed in my in-tray. One chapter in and I was hooked. My original pretty and functional site was soon awash with plenty of little jQuery effects and goodies. Probably overkill for what was actually needed but once you start playing it becomes pretty difficult to leave alone. Remember when you discovered all those photoshop layer effects? Remember how you used them in earnest way back when? You’re going to do the same again here. But as time goes on you learn to use where appropriate and go throwing everything including the kitchen sink into a design. JQuery is another set of tools to add to your ever expanding web design toolbox and this is the manual.

Learning jQuery 1.3 by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg is published by Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) and has a recommended retail price of £24.99.

Read a sample chapter or buy it direct from Packt Publishing.