I was lucky enough to attend the .net award ceremony this year. Boagworld was again shortlisted for podcast of the year, for which we won, and that nice man Paul asked me to collect the award as he was hosting the event.

It was a glitzy affair (I had to wear a suit!) held at the Altitude 360 which is on the 29th floor of Millbank Tower in London. The views are astounding!

The view from Altitude 360

Boagworld won podcast of the year for the second year in a row which is fantastic. We were up against CreativeXpert and Freelance Radio which are great podcasts and well worth a listen to.

Podcast of the Year - Boagworld

Other awards went to:

Design agency of the year: ClearLeft
Web application of the year: Dropbox
Viral campaign of the year: Best Job in the World by Nitro
Best community site: Twitter
Open source application of the year: jQuery
Redesign of the year: whitehouse.gov
Innovation of the year: Google Chrome
Interactive site of the year: Nvidia Speak Visual by Odopod and Cutwater
Standards Champion: Jeffery Zeldman
Blog of the year: Smashing Magazine
Best API use: TweetDeck
Web personality of the year: Stephen Fry
Infamy award: IE6
Vodcast of the year: Diggnation

Congratulations to everyone who won.

A definite highlight of the evening was Stephen Frys acceptance video for his award!

Was also awesome to catch up/finally meet: Dan Oliver, Tom May, Oliver Lindberg, Richard Rutter, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith, Natalie Downe, Sarah Parmenter, Sam Brown, Elliot Jay Stocks, Jason Cale, Cath Boag, Paul Boag, Ian Forrester, Natalie Jahangiry, Simon Campell, Simon Collison and Jamie Pittock.

Congratulations to the .net team for throwing such a successful event. Maybe I could be nominated for Vodcast of the year next year? *wink wink*

Also thanks for the goody bag!

.net Awards Goody Bag

I’m not going to repeat Andy post here so read it yourself on his site. The question I asked however was this:

Okay, well IE8 is also missing a few of the other more popular CSS3 selectors that are available in other browsers, like border-radius and things like that. Is this a setback for CSS3?

And he answered:

The interesting thing, though, and this is the wider issue, is that there’s no strategic plan, either from the browser makers or, most importantly, from the CSS working group, where they plan in a timetable implementation of these new features. Now we’re not talking about the big design of CSS, and when are we going to get new layout features and things like that, but simple things like for example CSS columns? Webkit implements CSS columns, Mozilla implements CSS columns, but they do it independently, they do it when they want to on their own timetable, and what I’d really like to see is for these browser makers to get together and say “You know what in September, we’re going to introduce these columns across the board, and in October, or in our next release, we’re going to implement this across the board.”

This really got me thinking…

It wouldn’t just be nice if browser manufacturers collaborated more, it’s vital!

The web is evolving at an unprecedented rate, and users expectations of the web are evolving too. Unfortunately we as developers are hindered by the restrictions of the browsers that these users utilize and I’m not just talking about Microsoft.

The simple fact of the matter is, unless all browsers introduce, for example, the same CSS style at relatively the same time, we as developers can not implement them.

In some cases we can employ progressive enhancement, like with the border-radius style available in Firefox & Safari, but background layers? No way. Not until all browser support the style consistently will us as developers begin to implement it to any great effect.

The CSS3 specification has been in working draft since May 2001. Only now with the release of IE8 have Microsoft got the rendering of CSS2 (recommendation May 1998) working properly (fingers crossed). It’s about time browser manufacturers got the fingers out and started working together to improve the web for all.

As a developer I find this industry an exciting one to work in, there’s always something new to play with and improve, but imagine were we would be today if say five years ago, browser manufacturers had all got together, said to each other “OK, lets make all our browsers render in the same way and support the same things” and started focusing on their individual browser interfaces and browser features, which to the average user is all the market upon anyway.

We designers/developers would be much further along at build the beautiful web that Andy advocates.

Arty shot of me and Paul traversing the Southampton wilderness...

Collecting Anna (Boagworld Technician) on route of course, all in all it was great fun and a chance to see Headscapes current setup, as they’re about to move offices to an amazing looking barn conversion. Hopefully we’ll be able to see that next time.

Also cool was meeting some of the Headscape developers who are also going to Future of Web Apps so an ideal opportunity to hang out with them a bit more.

Anyway this is just a short post to say a big thank you to Paul and Marcus for having us and link to the show for those who are interested…

Boagworld: Show 138. Q&A

Boagworld - Show 128. Details, News by Me and Stanton

It’s very surreal, for me anyway, to be involved with Boagworld because I’ve learn’t so much from the show myself!

Stanton and I selected the four news items this week:

• Silverback Launches
• PatternTap
• Google App Engine Update
• S3 Goes Down

And recored it in my new study. Admittedly the audio quality for our section this week isn’t the best, in fact our setup consisted of a mic sat between an upright U2 book with a .net magazine laid across the top to reduce noise… :-| but we are aiming to improve upon this when we host the show next week.

Host the show? That’s right! Not only is Paul in Scotland but Marcus is off on holiday too…

So it’s down to us. taylorstantonworld here we come!

Marcus Lillington setting up.

Note: To avoid confusion i’ll refer to Paul Stanton as just Stanton in this blog. Any other reference to the name Paul is Paul Boag.

So the big day finally arrived, Saturday 20th October 2007, the recording of the 100th boagworld podcast LIVE! in London at the Ye Old Cock Tavern.

The Ye Old Cock Tavern, London

What’s boagworld? Shame on you for having to ask, head over to the site www.boagworld.com to find out.

For those of you who are avid listeners and supporters of Paul and Marcus and whom couldn’t attend the event, maybe because of the rugby or the tube closures or if an international flight wasn’t possible, you’ll be pleased to know that we recorded the whole podcast! All… but the final 4 minutes, so I apologies to the final speaker, a man from Yahoo! I believe, who gets cut off, I ran out of battery life. I’m sorry. :-(

Stanton and I jumped in the car and travelled 200 miles south from Leeds to attend the event. And what an event it was. For our efforts, Paul Boag has rewarded each of us with a 1 year subscription to .net magazine, thank you Paul.

It’s quite a surreal experience meeting people whom you’ve listened to every week for months and I recall turning to Stanton when Marcus arrived, whispering:

Ryan: “Paul, Paul, That’s Marcus Lillington!”

Stanton: “Are you sure?”

Ryan: “No”

Stanton: “…Wait till he says something.”

So we strained to hear him order a pint at the bar. In hind sight the multiple bags and recording equipment should have been a clear give away. :-S

Next to arrive was a young 6th former called Anna who looked like a lost lamb when she first arrived, Stanton and I dutifully took her under our wing (or adopted her as Paul has called it in his blog) and she became the star of the show when she presented Paul with a homemade, 100th podcast cake for which she has won a CSS For Beginners course, and she’s over the moon.

Anna's 100th podcast cake.

With a free bar to fuel us, we headed straight into recording the podcast. Stanton, Anna and myself had front row seats near Cath (Paul Boags’ wife), a lovely person who should definitely be on more podcasts if only too heckle Paul, watch out Paul we’ll be signing a petition next! ;-)

So let’s get on with the show, we started, instead of the normal news section, with a discussion on the five biggest news stories since the show kicked off in August 2005:

After 20 minutes of news related dicussion, we swiftly moved onto Marcus’ section which kicked off into a group discussion on nightmare clients:

Instead of the “Ask an expert” section we finished off with an “Ask Paul and Marcus anything we like” section. This went on for nearly an hour, so put the kettle on and get comfy. Both Stanton and myself asked questions in this section so watch out for them. :-)

For those of you who have a particular interested in the discussion relating to careers, and whether or not you need a degree, you may find Annas Blog entitled Planning Your Career, University vs. Training on the Job? an interesting discussion.

When the podcast offically finished, Stanton and myself began to mingle. We had the opportunity to speak to some great people who we hope to keep in touch with.

For inexplicable reasons the Ye Old Cock Tavern kicked us all out and was closed by 10pm. So we moved to another pub round the corner. In the second pub, Paul did his celebrity bit, signing autographs and posing for pictures.

Paul Boag signing an autograph.

Me and Paul Boag

Paul Stanton and Paul Boag

We sat around and chatted for a while longer before the group finally dispersed and me and Stanton, after making sure we had escorted Anna to the train station safely, disappeared into the Center of London in search for more beer… :-|

It was only when we saw this picture:

Me with dirty pizza.

That we vaguely recalled haggling for that pizza at 4am in the only take away we could find that was open… Oh the hang overs.

Final Words

Finally we would just like to say from ourselves, and on behalf of the boagworld community, a big thank you to Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington for all the hard work they put into the podcast and for hosting such great event.

We hope that the podcast will live on till way past its 200th episode, and we’ll be there propping up the bar. :-)

Cheers Paul and Marcus!

For more pictures of the event see these links:

• Paul Stantons Flickr Pictures
• Ryan Taylors Flickr Pictures
• Other Flickr Pictures