There are a lot cool meetings and conferences I’ll attend the next few months. I hope to meet people I only know via the internet, and I’m sure I’ll learn new, exciting things.

But I’d like to start with a meeting in the past. Thanks to Kilian, I could enjoy Nokia Trends Lab in Amsterdam last Thursday. The trends lab itself was not very amazing, but it was fun though. Nokia didn’t show many things, only two models that are just updates of existing ones. The event was planned until 2pm, so I had to leave much earlier because I had to catch a train. The band Moke was very entertaining.

Next Friday I hope to learn some things on the design side of creating web sites. In Delft the Internetcreatieven Kennisdag takes place. I’m not a real designer, but I really like to expand my knowledge on this subject.

Early in April, Adobe will held a cool one-day conference on their new product: AIR. Adobe AIR is a way to use web applications on your desktop. With JavaScript, Flash or Flex (you guess what technique I use) it is possible to create so called AIR-applications, which can easily communicate with APIs from web services. At the conference several Adobe employees will talk about it, and there is time for discussion and other things.

A week later, pfcongrez is held. I’m looking forward to learn about PHP frameworks, and it is very cool Marktplaats.nl will share some bits about how their web site works.

Last, but absolutely not least: I will attend @media this year! Two days of meeting amazing people, listening to well-known speakers and exploring London. The full schedule is not known at the moment of writing, but I’m sure there will be many intersting presentations. Last year I couldn’t make it, but at this moment all lights are green. I’m looking forward to take my plane just a few hours after making my mathematics exam (oh, you didn’t know I haven’t finished secondary education yet?).

So, are you planning to go to any of the mentioned meetings or conferences? I’d love to hear, we possibly can get to know each other. Just leave a comment over here :)

Last week I had to use IE6 for a web shop to work. The total session included the payment via PayPal, and I had a very unsafe feeling about all this.

I know it. Many front-end developers like me don’t really like the browser because of the numerous bugs in its rendering engine. But my feelings were because of the security bugs. Since the release of IE7 over a year ago, Microsoft only fixes the most threatening exploits. The total usage of IE7 is fifty percent, so the other fifty percent is IE6 (and sometimes IE5.5).

However, I think I have a solution to make users aware of browsers. Unlike us as developers, they simply use ‘the Internet’, and not ‘a browser’. And because they’re not aware enough, they simply do not update them.

My solution is as following. I may assume all banks and web services like PayPal care about security. And since they do, it is very important their costumers safely use their online banking. I mean a safe and up to date browser and OS. The ‘client side’ is the only thing they cannot control.

So, what if your bank’s website simply detects if you use a safe browser and OS? The first one can easily be done with a conditional comment. Detecting the last one is impossible (you cannot fetch what updates are installed). If the web service detects an unsafe browser, it can simply display a text including a link with more information. This would work much like the IsItAFuckingIrritatingBrowser web page, made by my Fronteers friend Krijn.

By the way, in The Netherlands we had an awareness campaign a while ago. Some commercials explained that users had to ‘check’ the security, website and payment. However, it was not explained how to do that, and the conversion rate is quite low. It is much more effective if you want to pay 300 Dollar or Euro with your online banking and you see a message that it might be unsafe to do with your current browser (of course not called ‘browser’).

I’m interested if any bank or service does something like this. Links? Screenshots? Anyone?