I’m currently laying on my Mum and Dad’s sofa with the old duvet thrown over me, which was normally reserved for sick days, powered by a very sugary cup of tea, still nursing a hangover from last night and awaiting pickup from hubby-to-be to take me back to our house.
I also have two nasty blisters on my hand from travelling halfway across the UK with a daft girly-sized suitcase and definitely not travelling light.
So I’m back from the DIBI Conference, wow, what a fantastic couple of days it has been. Gavin Elliot and the guys at Codeworks thought of everything, Red Bull in afternoon break 1 and ice cream tubs in afternoon break 2 were particularly noted, fully catered lunches, snacks, drinks, after-party drinks and dinner, great communication and lovely people with it as well. Throw in the fact they also had a large percentage of speakers coming from abroad and had the aftermath of the volcanic ash cloud travelling panic to deal with too, (cueing alternative travel arrangements across the board) they have dealt with everything superbly.
I was honoured to be alongside the seasoned conference speakers such as Andy Clarke, Dan Rubin and Simon Collison who were all fantastic and clearly had the art of public speaking down to a “T”. I had read Confessions of a Public Speaker prior to DIBI and these guys could have written the book themselves.
I’m not going to go in-depth into the talks as I think this is better done from the point of view of a true attendee, and there are already some lurking on the world wide web;
- Some thoughts on the DIBI by Armitage Solutions
- Thoughts on DIBI by Minute44
- DIBI by David Appleyard
It was a fantastic experience for me, I had a great time meeting lots of different people and hopefully enlightening even more with some iPhone UI knowledge they didn’t have previously. I’ve had some really great feedback from people who went to the conference but I’d also appreciate any constructive criticism you feel would be beneficial for my next talks, which would be FOWD (London) and FrontEndConference (Florida) , that too would also be gratefully received (sarah at youknowwhodesign.com).
As I am speaking about a similar topic at FOWD, I’ve made the decision to not make my slides public until after that point, I really feel it would ruin it for FOWD attendees as the principles of iPhone UI are not going to change between now and the middle of May – even though it’s a new talk and we get to go a bit more in-depth as we have the advantage of more time, I still want to keep things a surprise for those attendees too.
I’ll of course honour anyone who has already sent me an email asking for slides from the conference as you’ve already seen everything contained within 🙂
Coming home, I also had a pleasant surprise of being sat with 3 lovely business people on their way back from a training course. We quickly got chatting, even quicker after I produced my iPad as one was an Apple fan. It was an absolute pleasure to speak with them for nearly three hours back to London and reminded me that we should all talk more, as brits we have such a habit of keeping ourselves to ourselves, one of the three now has my business card and we have connected on Twitter. The perfect end to a really fantastic few days away.
Now to sort the email aftermath…