Thinking

The Geek Girls will be running a picnic at this year’s dConstruct. So if you’re a girl geek who wants a chance to meet other girl geeks from Brighton and beyond, stick your name down and grab your sarnies! Boys are most welcome, although you must bring a girl along with you.

dConstruct tickets have been flying off the shelves and we’re expecting to sell out within the next few days. If you’d like to come to the conference but haven’t got a ticket, get in there now. Both the HTML5 & CSS3 Wizardry and Designing for Mobile Experiences workshops are now full, but there are still spaces on the jQuery for Designers and Internet of Things workshops so if you want to come along, grab your ticket now.

Don’t forget, you could also enter the dConstruct Time Capsule competition to win a VIP pass to the conference. The closing date is this Friday.

Clearleft is looking for a senior client-side engineer to join our small but prestigious team in sunny Brighton. This is a fantastic opportunity to join a company committed to doing things the right way. So if you want to make a difference and share your knowledge with the larger web community, this could be the perfect job for you.

To Celebrate the 5th birthday of dConstruct, we’re collecting a time capsule of objects, images and experiences that represent what life is like as a digital native in 2009. We’ve already seeded the time capsule with some of our own cultural curiosities, so now it’s over to you.

Getting involved couldn’t be simpler. Look at what’s around you now, what would you preserve in a time capsule for future generations? Take a photo and upload it to flickr, tagged with #dconstructcapsule. For extra credit, add a short description explaining the importance of your artifact to future digital archeologists.

As an extra, special inducement, the best entry will receive a VIP pass to dConstruct which includes attendance to our exclusive speakers dinner and two nights accommodation at myHotel in Brighton.

So strap on your jet packs and get snapping.

http://2009.dconstruct.org/capsule/

We’d like to announce our latest sponsor, Splendid, who’ll be joining us at dConstruct next month. They’ll also be bringing along their Microsoft Surface for those of you who want to get your sticky fingers on one. How splendid is that?

There’s only a month to go until the event and Sophie is busy organising the workshop schedules, making final arrangements with the venue and taking her first look at this year’s programme. If you’re coming along, don’t forget to sort out your travel arrangements & book your hotel.

Those lovely chaps at Boagworld are running a competition to win tickets to this year’s dConstruct.

Boagworld will be giving away two tickets each worth £115+VAT. To win a ticket you have to complete the following sentence on Twitter…

My perfect web conference would include…

Tweet your answer by the 1st August for a chance of winning. We will then pick the two most inspirational/funny/entertaining answers and contact you by email.

There are still dConstruct tickets available so please do grab yourself one before they all go.

We needed a bigger place to accommodate our recent growth and when a nice big office became available on the other side of the corridor we jumped at the chance. Our new address is Studio 6, 28 Kensington Street, Brighton, BN1 4AJ, UK.

Check out Natalie’s photos of the move with top notch teamwork in play, and Cennydd’s sneak preview of the new office as we start to settle in nicely.

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to set your alarms or calendar notifications as tickets for dConstruct go on sale this Monday at 11am. As always we’ve scoured the world to bring you an amazing line-up of speakers. People who educated, entertained and inspired us over the last couple of years.

We’ve got insightful speakers like Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware”, talking about ubiquity and location, or Russell Davies from Wired Magazine talking about the rise in post digital culture. We’ve got entertaining and educational sessions like Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel’s excellent talk about interaction paradigms in science fiction movies. And dConstruct wouldn’t be complete without it’s share of practical sessions like Brian Fling’s talk and subsequent workshop on designing for the mobile Internet.

But it doesn’t stop there. We’ve got a fantastic line-up of workshops this year with topics like jQuery for Designers, HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry and the sure to be popular Internet of Things Master Class.

As you know, tickets for dConstruct are always popular and tend to sell out fast. So tie a not in your hankie, clear your schedule for the morning and secure your tickets before it’s too late.

We’ve just published details of the workshops we’ll be running before the dConstruct conference.

• Designing Mobile Experiences by Brian Fling
• jQuery for Designers by Remy Sharp
• HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry by Richard Rutter, Jeremy Keith and Natalie Downe
• Internet of Things Master Class by Matt Biddulph, Nick Weldin and Daniel Soltis

We’ll start selling tickets from the 22nd of June, and early bird prices are £345 + VAT per workshop. As a workshop attendee, you’ll get complimentary entrance to the dConstruct conference on the 4th of September.

We’re very happy that Perch will be sponsoring this year’s dConstruct.

Perch is a really little content management system for those who want to edit content without having to set up a big CMS. Brought to you by those fantastic chaps at edgeofmyseat.com; Perch is inexpensive, quick to deploy and has a simple installation process, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

There are still sponsorship opportunities available for this year’s event. If you’re interested check out the sponsorship information available.

Batch ExportRyan, Simon, lwaldal, David, Darvers, Ranguard and Richard all asked for the ability to export multiple sessions, which you can now do in version 1.1. You can export an entire project at once by going to File > Export Project.

Chapter Marker FeedbackRoland asked for visual feedback when adding chapter markers. We thought this was a great idea, so in the new version when you add a chapter marker, the Silverback Gorilla icon in the taskbar briefly flashes.

Language SupportWe asked you what languages you want us to support. Silverback now supports German, Spanish, and Japanese. So thanks to our excellent translators — David Rodriguez, Sebastian Gerhard, Michael Grosch, Julian Schrader, and Satoshi Kikuchi.

As well as these features, we’ve also fixed bugs you flagged up.

iMovie import incompatibilityYou wanted to import sessions into iMovie, but videos with chapter markers were incompatible with the software. So we added an iMovie compatibility option. To export an iMovie friendly video, go to Silverback > Preferences > Export, and uncheck the “Output chapter marks” option.

Bug with cancelling exportsYou told us about a problem with cancelling exports. So we fixed this.

Audio/Video lagYou also told us that the video was lagging behind the sound. So we’ve fixed this too.

As always, your feedback is really useful to us and helps make Silverback better.

Ticket sales for this year’s dConstruct will be open from 11am on Monday 22nd June. Tickets tend to sell out quickly so stick the date in your diary now.

We’re really excited about the line-up, we’ve got Adam Greenfield, Robin Hunicke, Russell Davies and many more all coming to Brighton to talk about “Designing for Tomorrow”. We’ll be updating the schedule, talk descriptions and workshop information soon, keep your eyes peeled for further details.

A little while ago we announced a competition to win a mountain of UX books, all signed just for the lucky winner.

We put all the names in a hat, shook it about a bit and picked out a name… and the winner is Theba Islam! Theba will be able to collect her prizes at the conference, and we do recommend bringing a big bag along to hold them all.

UX London is now only eight weeks away. Conference bag schwag is starting to arrive at the Clearleft offices, Sophie is hard at work planning all the details and we’re all getting very excited about the big event.

Paul gave an awesome presentation called “Oooh, that’s clever! (unnatural experiments in web design)” at SXSW interactive festival yesterday, to a packed auditorium. If you’re here looking for his slides, he’ll be uploading them here in a week or so they can be found at paulannett.co.uk/sxsw09. You can find many of the example sites he used at del.icio.us/paulannett/sxsw09

You can also follow Paul on Twitter.

For those of you who would like to come but haven’t managed to purchase a ticket so far, we do have a waiting list running. Please fill in your name and contact details and we’ll be in touch if we have any returns.

We’re really excited about this year’s event and are busy planning all the little details which we hope will make the conference so enjoyable for all our attendees.

For those of you in or around the London area, we’re buying beers for the next UX Bookclub event. Come along and say hello!

Want to come to UX London? Course you do! If you’re quick, there’s still time to grab yourself an early bird ticket. You’ve got until 25th February (that’s next Wednesday) to register either by credit card or invoice request.

Don’t forget, all early bird registrations will be entered into our book competition. The winner gets a stack of books, all signed by the authors just for you.

So come on, register now! You know you want to.