“We’re a digital agency… and there's two Jakes…”
Last night, I spoke at the latest Opera back standards>next gig, hosted at MadLab in Manchester. Chris Mills put the call out months ago, asking if I'd like to take part, and could I herd up anyone else to speak. I recommended my fellow skating (albeit inline-blader!) and Fudge front-ender Mike Byrne as he's a lively character, and certainly knows his shit, and that made four. Chris kicked off, followed, by myself and Typography Online.
I'm really pleased to say that the whole Liverpool session of Speak The Web went down really well. I managed to get through 30 minutes without committing social hari kari or making too bigger tit of myself. Pat Lauke was in full on Opera and HTML5 brainwash form, but energetic and interesting enough to be different from Chris Mill's session at Leeds. The coup de grâce was obviously Simon Collison of Erskine Design, with his In the Pursuit of Magic presentation, and fair play to him for being drugged up but persevering and putting on a really thoughtful and inspiring presentation.
We're happy to say that Jake's first article on dev.opera.com has gone live. The article is a technical piece covering sIFR, a flash-based technology for swapping fonts in titles and headers for your own custom fonts that the end-user won't have installed on their machine. It makes good reading for anyone new to sIFR or struggling understanding the principles. Jake's no stranger to being published though, having had a regular column in .net magazine, and chapters in many Friends of ED books in the past. To be honest, he's the office spell-checker and grammar overlord. Visit dev.opera and read the article