Singapore Web DesignerHonestly, PopOut was good except for one thing » AEN—Designer & Consultant

It was a good evening at PopOut!’07. I went with my widgeo.us guys, U-Zyn, Ridzuan and Kah Wee and my girlfriend Vivi.

Eric’s Chia presentation was horribly intolerable. His excuse for the faulty profile editing was that there was something wrong with Suntec’s connection, while Herry’s BookJetty Ajax calls were blazing fast. I went back home and signed up for Quaffs and tried to edit my profile with their “edit-in-place” feature and the same thing happens, it just displays “Saving…” And you know what’s the most web2.0 thing about it? YOU CAN’T TAB THE FIELDS! Not trying to be an obsessive Web Standards Nazi (as Mr Ross Weitch of Bezurk calls someone in his team), Quaffs’ XHTML 1.0 Transitional site did not validate. It’s always good to get things right before you brag about your sub-par Ajax and awesome 21-year old “Creative Director” and designer of the site. I don’t know about the others, the first time I went into quaffs.com, I felt like I walked into a disco.

Talk about reinventing the wheel. After his terrible army-style opening and intro on his OOD (Objects Of Desire) crap, I SMSed U-Zyn that the only OOD I want is his corpse. Thanks TDM, you killed my evening by putting that twerp on stage. Thanks to Herry though, without him I wouldn’t have been able to swallow my supper.

Along with Herry, I was able to meet some other cool dudes. Mr Michael Lim who was talking to me over MSN about his new online comics project, was already presenting an interesting prototype in his booth. A very fresh idea and I am sure it will become a popular service. Be sure to watch this space.

There were the usual guys like Bernard, James from Thymos Capital, Ping.sg and TDM folks. Always good to catch up. Mr Gen Kanai from Mozilla Asia gave a good talk on Firefox and its history and briefly mentioned features like native video and SVG capabilities without the need of plugins in Firefox 3 and 4. His evaluation of the 5 product demonstrations was good, albeit half-hearted but I can see that he is impressed by Herry’s work and attitude on building and maintaning BookJetty.

Another booth on demo was the iJAM website, which was designed by yours truly. It is a strange feeling when you see people lining up to sign up for a website which you have designed.

Honestly, PopOut!’07 was good except for that big turn off.