I tell you, walking everywhere sure makes for solid sleeping. I wake up each morning and I feel like I could just continue to sleep for hours. This morning I said screw it to T.G.I. Fridays and got a bagel from the starbucks downstairs. They need a toaster.Woo, panels!
Designing for Convergent Devices
I wanted to go to this panel because it relates to what we’re doing at work. The panelists spoke a lot about the differences between various web means of accessing the web. The consensus seemed to be that you provide an experience that is knowleagable of its means of access. For example, you can’t take your web app that is normally accessed via a desktop and simply change the headers and then bam you have mobile access. Let me modify that slightly to say that you can, but that you shouldn’t. You have to know take things into consideration like screen size, for example.
Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic
Ah, Jeffy and company’s panel. The panel overall was good, it simply started out slow. The premise of the panel was simply how specific designers do what they do. The beginning of the panel started with things like what influences each designer and how their day progresses. I think a lot of the audience would have preferred to gloss over this part in a much quicker fashion. I don’t think that they necessarily had to take this part out, but perhaps go through it much faster as most people here don’t particularly care. People know how they get things done, if one of the panelists have a completely different way of scheduling their day, I don’t think they’re going to up and change. Then there were ping pong balls, no offense to the panel but I think that could have been cut, too. The latter half of the panel got more into what I think people were expecting. Things like what tools people use to help speed up their day. A lot of the audience questions seemed to help the panel along. And as a side note, Jeff needs to stop worrying so damn much about how the panel went. 🙂
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask
Great panel. Brian Fling of Blue Flavor knows his mobile shit. I think this panel was well done for a number of reasons: his presentation was very flowing and not contrived or forced at all, he’s obviously very knowledgeable about his subject matter, and his actual presentation, namely his slides, were very well organized and were good looking. A lot of good information in it, too. There is a lot of potential in mobile, though on a personal note, I just don’t get it. I think this is mainly due to my crappy phone – a problem which will be rectified as soon as I get back to Kansas. I need to find his slides online, too…
I was going to go to AJAX or Flash: What’s Right for You?, but didn’t.
This panel wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be about. Basically, it talked about the differences between 1.5 and the upcoming 1.7 versions of Javascript. Seems all nice and everything, except for the fact that Firefox 2.0 is the only browser who is using 1.7. Consequently, I just don’t see any point in using that stuff now. That all being said, block level scope is cool.
Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design
This was a very interesting panel. Usually when you hear of the holy trinity of design you hear about HTML, CSS, and JS or structure, presentation, and behavior. This panel defined the holy trinity as users, content, and business. The theory being that any failure of one would cause the whole app or site to fail. There was also some talk about cohesiveness of teams and things along those lines.
And that’s it for panels on Sunday.
Then we went bowling! Brian, who put on the event, held it at the 300, which is probably the swankiest place to bowl anywhere. Not to mention that the place was huge – 52 lanes. Our team consisted of myself, Jeff Croft, his girlfriend Michelle, Matt Croydon, Nathan Borror, and Chris Kavinsky playing for Wilson Miner who couldn’t find a bus that would get him there on time. After a practice round that I totally sucked at, our qualifying round went quite well. I think most of us on the team were quite surprised. I magically bowled a 102, which ended up being exactly what our team average was. It was just under the 110 average needed to make the next round, but it worked out in the end because we were all pretty tired after the first round itself.
Surprisingly, after we left the bowling alley I decided to call it a night. Crazy huh?
Hi – thanks for attending the Designing for Convergent Devices panel. I was the moderator and was thrilled with the turnout and participation from the audience. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line any time.
Jeff