eri on the interweb

I was totally enamored by the Microsoft Surface at WebDU. Here is a mix of what I learnt, filmed and experienced.

Touch Design Principles

Shane Morris outlined some design prinicples when designing for the Surface, but many would apply to designing for smaller touch screen devices.

• Don’t deploy a desktop application to a new device, consider the specific requirements of a touch interface
• You may be designing for more than one simultaneous user. Users may be interacting from different directions so the app should be ‘direction-less’.
• Non functional gestures need to be acknowledged. (Vapour trails have been built into the Surface platform to orient the user and show non consequential hand gestures.)
• Use large targets. Avoid traditional controls.
• Design for the super real i.e. design digital objects using real world objects as inspiration. Think about how the object  behaves in the real world, to design how the virtual object responds to touch.

Collis Ta’eed spoke at webDU a few years ago on how to start a web community. He should know, Collis founded the Envato network which publishes PSD Tuts, Vector Tuts, Active Tuts, Freelance Switch amongst other titles. It’s inspiring to hear about web success stories. The Envato network employs 25 people and attracts ‘a few million visitors a month’. Impressive.

Often it is difficult for speakers to share lessons learned in work, because of client confidentiality, and because sometimes it’s not good business to give too many secrets away. To solve this dilemma Collis delivered his presentation on how to start a web business by discussing a hypothetical case study. His words of wisdom are summarised below.

How do you come up with an idea?

• Solve a problem you have yourself experienced.
• Observe and look for audience niches that experience this problem.

Adobe were a little self aware post Steve Jobs anti Flash rant but not defensive at this year’s webDU conference. Why? Because Flash continues to improve and there are few haters in the webDU crowd. Gone was the spiel about the quick uptake of flash and flash penetration in the market place. The emphasis this year was on performance improvements in Flash beta 10.1. Expect more fan fare after the official release later this year.

Flash 10.1 beta talking points:

• touch apis
• improved audio support
• performance improvements
• Flash mobile applications run on various platforms and devices.
  App stores for flash developers on these platforms are more open to developers than you-know-who.

The touch capabilities of Flash were best illustrated by this video, developed by Struck Axiom, that I crudely caught on my camera.

I have been to 4 webDU conferences and this was the first year that I was not on the Daemon organising team. It felt strange to not have to do anything but enjoy myself, and that I did.

In the Day 1 keynote Mike Chambers from Adobe came out at the gates in defense of Flash (hi Mr Jobs). Acknowledging how CPU intensive flash video can be he spoke of Flash performance improvements on mobile and the desktop. He also demoed the new flash touch apis on tablets, phones and larger screens. Microsoft were there and to the delight of many brought along a Microsoft Surface. It was a blast to play with. It was interesting to hear from Shane Morris about what constraints were put into the behaviour of the Surface. In his talk Shane outlined design principles with case studies of applications designed for ANZ, Lonely Planet and Cochlear. This was my highlight of the conference. Other more technical sessions that I did not attend talked more specifically about touch technologies e.g. Dmitry Baranovskiy demonstrated the gestural capability of his Raphael javascript library.