Loose notes from SXSW 2010 panel discussion Is Canvas the End of Flash?. This debate is really heating up as more browsers gain Canvas support and sentiment seems to be rapidly turning against Flash. But how feasible is it to consider the canvas element a real Flash replacement? Five panelists hashed it out, with excellent points on all sides. Very useful session.
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Why Your Baby is Ugly – Effective Dashboard Design
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session Why Your Baby is Ugly – Effective Dashboard Design, with Aaron Hursman of Hitachi Design. Though I’ve only ever worked on one dashboard system, I am interested in data visualization, and this was an excellent crossover session for both dataviz and information design concepts.
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Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe, with Darren Delaye and Michael Leggett of Google. I’m more of a back-end guy than a designer, but with an increasing interest in design considerations and usability. This became one of the most useful sessions of the conference for me.
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Jaron Larnier Presentation
Loose notes from the SXSW 2010 session Untitled by Jaron Larnier.
Wasn’t sure what to expect from this session, which had no title and no description. But a few weeks ago, the photo professor at the J-School handed me a copy of Larnier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget, a sort of backlash manifesto against the digital age. Well, that’s not entirely fair — it’s not so much a backlash as it is a reasoned, thoughtful wander through some of the gotchas and backwaters of the digital age. Larnier talks about dignity, culture, black boxes, the history of our relationship to technology, mean-ness in online communities, and everything in between. His talk was as meandering as the book is, but inspirational and amazing at every turn. Though difficult to encapsulate, Larnier and his thread is something I feel everyone and tech should be listening to.
RIP Content Management System
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session RIP Content Management System by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert.
Unfortunately, the “R.I.P. part of the session title was never addressed, nor were any of Drupal’s core shortcomings or architectural annoyances. This was unfortunately just a 30-minute informercial for Drupal.
Would really have preferred to have heard Dries talk about plans to address Drupal’s deep archtitectural problems like lack of object orientation, lack of an ORM, lack of MVC, and annoying templating system. Took notes anyway.
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Evan Williams Keynote Interview
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session: Evan Williams Keynote Interview
Director of the Havas Media Lab Umair Haque interviews Twitter founder Evan Williams (@ev). The interview began with technical difficulties, segued into a way-too-brief introduction to the new integration platform @anywhere, got interesting for a little while, then became mired into me-centric, smug ramblings of an interviewer who appeared more interested in showing off his own intelligence than in extracting juicy bits from the interviewee. Eventually the whole thing turned into a train wreck, with audience members walking out in droves. The back-channel was brutal to Haque, and attendees were walking out in droves. A full third of the audience left out of boredom after half an hour. Almost embarrassing to watch.
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Wow, That’s Cool… Fun With HTML5 Video
Loose notes from the SXSW 2010 session Wow, That’s Cool… Fun With HTML5 Video, with Michael Dale of Wikimedia and Christopher Blizzard of Mozilla.
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HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches
Loose notes from the SXSW 2010 session HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches, in two parts (history lesson and examples). With Bruce Lawson of Opera and Martin Kliehm of namics.
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Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps
Loose notes from the SXSW 2010 session Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps, hosted by :
Gina Trapani of Lifehacker and now author of Google Wave book. Also made BetterGmail and ThinkTank;
Matt Haughey – Fuelly – public social miles per gallon site, also creator of MetaFilter (now a 4-employee corporation); Adam Pash – MixTape.me (playlist/music sharing site). Also Belvedere and Texter.
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Server-Side Javascript
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session Javascript: The Front and the Back of It, on using server-side Javascript to reduce the pain points of the few non-DRY areas left in MVC stacks.