Jef­frey Veen is doing a full day work­shop the day before Web Essen­tials in Syd­ney called “Design­ing the Next Gen­er­a­tion of Web Apps”.

It sounds like really good stuff — RIAs and Ajax stuff, user inter­ac­tion and usabil­ity — and Mr Veen is, of course, the guru of all such things. Unfor­tu­nately I have to work Tues­day, and still make the long trek over to the East­ern states, so I won’t be going — typical!

Is it just me or has usabil­ity been one of the big top­ics this year? It seems even design­ers devel­op­ers work­ing on smaller projects have been think­ing and talk­ing (and blog­ging!) about it. Like it’s not only for peo­ple with big bud­gets and test­ing labs any­more. It prob­a­bly helps that cool peo­ple like Jeff are out there talk­ing it up too, because let’s face it, Jakob Nielsen isn’t exactly beloved in the designer com­mu­nity for being hip and hap­pen­ing. Any­way, usabil­ity com­bined with Ajax, the buzz­word of the year, the work­shop should be pretty inter­est­ing. *Sigh*.