A HattersWorkshop Blog – Technology, The Web, and Everything
Notes from An Event Apart Boston 2012 I had a great time at An Event Apart Boston, 2012. Ill post some photos soon. The conference avoided deep dives into code in favor of showing WHY you would do reactive design. As Eric Meyer said "My...
Judging the CT Student Innovation Exposition (E-Commerce)... Want to know what the next 10 years will look like? Ask a high school student. Their creativity isnt limited by their knowledge of what we currently call technological limitations. They have a vision of...
The Value of Feeling Appreciated as an Employee in... Whether you’re a new employee or the vice president of the company, everyone wants to feel valued, even appreciated, in the workplace. Not only does it improve morale and make the workplace a more pleasant...
The difference between classic and motion tweens in... Here it is: If you're used to doing things "the cs3 way" then you can continue to do so with the classic tween tool. It works the same way as you remember, using key frames as normal, but you cannot...
PHP: If (equal to AND not equal) - eliminate form spam... Just learned a great function of PHP thats already made my forms a lot better. A while back I wrote an article about eliminating form spam without captchas by using css to hide a text input box for bots...
Jun
22
2012
Category : Around The Office, Confrence Notes
Below are my notes from Jared Spool’s presentation “The Curious Properties
of Intuitive Web Pages” at An Event Apart Boston 2012:
The Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge
MeoAK = Chippowah for WTF
People at the bottom know nothing, people at the top knew everything
Current knowledge is what you currently know
Target knowledge is what you need to know to accomplish the goal Contunue Reading
Jun
22
2012
Below are my notes from Josh Clark’s presentation “Web Typography” at An Event Apart Boston 2012:
Opening Questions:
Touch and other new input methods such as speech, facial recognition, gesture, etc in the next 10 years, so how can we future proof our work?
What happens to menus and buttons when you lose the cursor?
How do we teach touch to new users?
Jun
22
2012
Category : Around The Office, Confrence Notes, Featured, Teaching
I had a great time at An Event Apart Boston, 2012. Ill post some photos soon.
The conference avoided deep dives into code in favor of showing WHY you would do reactive design.
As Eric Meyer said “My goal in this presentation is to create a platform that you can jump off from – not show you an end point”
Day 1:
Jeffrey Zeldman – “Content First!” Notes
Witney Hess – “Whats your Problem” Notes
Jason Santa Maria – “Web Typography” Notes
Scott Berkun – “The 5 Most Dangerous Ideas” Notes
Karen McGrane – “Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content” Notes
Day 2:
Eric Meyer “The Future Is Now” Notes
Scott Jehl “Responsibility + Responsivity” Notes
Josh Clark “Buttons are a Hack” Notes
Luke W “Mobile to the Future” Notes
Dan Cederholm “Handcrafted Patterns” Notes
Jared Spool “The Curious Properties of Intuitive Web Pages” Notes
Day 3:
Luke W “Designing Mobile Web Experiences”
Jun
22
2012
Category : Around The Office, Confrence Notes
Below are my notes from Scott Jehl’s presentation “Responcibility + Responsivity” at An Event Apart Boston 2012:
In poor countries, most access is on the cell
Disgraceful Degradation – A shocking unacceptable user experience
We rely on HTTP requests, which are not always accurate, or complete, and sometimes dont come correctly, especially in developing countries with limited connectivity or lots of packet loss. Contunue Reading
Jun
22
2012
Category : Around The Office, Confrence Notes
Below are my notes from Eric Meyer’s presentation “The Future Is Now” at An Event Apart Boston 2012:
Using non Prefixed CSS Code
New CSS Gradients – Gradients are “seen” as images
Background-size, background-repeat, and background-position: property can resize and position multiple background elements, including background gradients, using a comma.
Jun
22
2012
Category : Around The Office, Confrence Notes
Below are my notes from Karen McGrane’s presentation “Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content” at An Event Apart Boston 2012:
COPE:
Create
Once
Publish
Everywhere
Jun
22
2012
Below are my notes from Jason Santa Maria presentation “Web Typography” at An Event Apart Boston 2012:
Typography is a major part of working online as most all communications on the web are typed.
Use of embedded web fonts enables stretchability, scalability, etc
Commonly used fonts should be embedded web font – save on image download size and development time
Jun
22
2012
Category : Around The Office, Confrence Notes, Teaching
Below are my notes from Witney Hess’s presentation “Whats your Problem” at An Event Apart Boston 2012:
Design for the Truth:
“If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes finding the solution.” – Albert Einstein
The problem is OUT THERE, not at your desk
Conduct user interviews to find the problem
After 5 Whys? You generally have the problem.
Example given is teachers not logging into a system…
Fishbone Diagram:
Crafting a Problem Statement:
Who Needs What Because Why
Teachers in non-sales regions need an in-depth onboarding process because they aren’t using critical settings.
Be bold - Stay focused on the problem, not the solution. When you focus on the solution you only see the single solution which may not be the best solution. Stay focused on the problem, not the solution.
Life is too short to waste it solving the wrong problems
Mar
24
2012
Category : Art & Design, Cool Websites, CSS, Slick Code, Technology, What I Read
Below are a few of my favorite examples of Responsive Web Design, the practice of setting media types allowing the design to scale to adapt to whatever the size of the screen that the user is using.
http://robot-or-not.com/
http://bostonglobe.com/
http://clearairchallenge.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
Device Agnostic Design
An article from Smashing Magazine talks about Device Agnostic Design which is a great future proofing advancement from responsive design. Being device agnostic means that you use your content to set break points, not the device you want the content to display on. This is important because if we spend time developing content for specific devices we are creating the next developer nightmare. There is no way to predict the size or aspect ratio of screens in the future. What happens if you design your site to perfectly fit your favorite tablet only to discover that the next generation of that same device has a slightly different sized screen.
For now, it seems as though developers are at the mercy of hardware makers. All we can do is hope they create some sort of a standard, and quick. In the meanwhile, we’ll have to make design decisions based on the content we want to show. After all, content is King.
