Personal notes on beyondtellerrand 2013

Wow, what a great conference! Last week I attended the new beyondtellerand conference 2013. I was so impressed by most of the speakers, the fabulous venue and again the supernice people I met.

Marc Thiele (@marcthiele) did an incredible good job in creating a really comfortable and friendly atmosphere at the main location Capitol Theater. I could write a lot about it but if you really wanna get a feeling for how polished everything was I recommend watching last years 3 minute recap at Vimeo.

Even I went to the pre-conference warm up in a brewery called “Zum Schlüssel“, I made it to the kick off talk next morning. 😉 Jeremy Keith (@adactio) took a look beyond the edge of the plate and pointed out why digital preservation and the web with it’s URLs is so necessary! Indiewebcamp, Longnow, Longbets and Zooniverse are just a few organizations already thinking in a long term scale. I found another but similar 15 minutes Jeremy Keith talk on YouTube. Watch it!

While most of the talks adressed web technologies, Kate Kiefer Lee (@katekiefer) gave us some deep insights into optimizing MailChimps company voice and how important that is. Voiceandtone.com is defenitly a must read if you run your own business or website!

Aaron Gustafson (@aarongustafson), writer of the book Adaptive Web Design introduced progressive enhancement and came up with the idea of retina image support opt out. A good one if your’re on a slow mobile connection.

First and foremost topic was web development with responsive design and the need for web designers to do most layout directly as HTML / CSS prototypes for immediate and better customer feedback on any screen size. Structure first! Photoshop files are not the right tool to define a design across all different use cases. And never design for a specific device – the web will exist longer than iPhones.

I was happy to have japanese lunch with Blain Cook (@blaine), Chris Heilmann (@codepo8) (who had a nifty Firefox OS Keon phone in his pocket) and Josh Brewer (@jbrewer), the guy who received standing ovations for his 45 minutes guitar concert. Wow!

I’ll definitely consider Harry Roberts (@csswizardry) CSS architecture, naming conventions, smacss and inuitcss/. Great help!

Atomic Design was Brad Frosts (@brad_frost) talk about HTML / CSS architecture and we laughed a lot about his introduction to pattern lab. Very entertaining!

Sadly I missed half of James Victores talk but it must have been really inspiring!

In the end just some links you and I should check: https://webmaker.org, http://blog.cloudfour.com/ and http://lanyrd.com/2013/btconf/ for the complete speaker list, videos, slides and more informations!

And don’t forget: “Always ask for more!”

[Update – collected talks]
Brad Frost – Atomic Design (on Vimeo)
Jeremy Keith – Beyond Tellerrand (on Vimeo)
Josh Brewer – Photoshop you are a liar (on Vimeo)

Adobe Tech Summit 2011 Berlin Notes

Currently I’m all day long busy learning more about JavaScript, webkit, iOS, web apps, browser differences and all the HTML 5 stuff while porting our SCORM based e-learning runtime. That kept me from following Adobe MAX and all the news regarding it so I took the opportunity to catch up a little bit by spending a whole day at Adobe Tech Summit 2011 Berlin (german). So here I’m simply sharing my notes:

CSS / HTML / JavaScript

Have a look at Adobe Edge at Adobe Labs. It seems to be a really helpful CSS/JavaScript animation tool and also a good research base for tweaks Adobe uses to be as cross browser as possible. If I understood Mark Enders right, Adobe Edge currently doesn’t use CSS transform for animations but for enabling hardware acceleration by just setting transformZ. If that works I’ll also use this approach.

Check out jQueryMobile and it’s virtual mouse events in particular. We had trouble with the onclick event on iOS so I need more information on that.

Just some links worth having a look at (again): Adobe Creative Cloud, Typekit, PhoneGap, The Expressive Web. Follow Paul Rouget and his work on the upcoming Mozilla Dev Tools and it’s really great features.

AIR / Flash / Flex

We all know Stage3D and hope to get it on devices soon, but for now we can look forward to Adobe Flex SDK 4.6 which includes a set of touch device components that will help to create touch AIR apps in almost no time. Native extensions for AIR 3.0 will also improve development for touch devices since we can then access every native device functionality. But for now we can at least develop hardware accelerated 2D stuff for the desktop using the Starling framework

Have fun coding!

FFK11 – beyond tellerrand notes

I’m still not sure if “beyond tellerrand” is a subtitle or will become the new brand for the one and only Flashforum conference here in germany. Sascha Wolter and Marc Thiele did a great job as always and even I never went to another conference, FFK seems still to be a special one. Again I was lucky listening to some really cool stuff.

Interestingly most of my last year notes are still up to date, which doesn’t help if you don’t keep them in mind. So I think it’s a good idea to read my own notes from time to time. 😉

That’s what I became aware of this time:

AIR 2.6

  • Lee Brimelow mentioned AIR 2.6 on iOS is faster than on Android! Yeah.
  • Adobe is working hard on increasing performance near to native code.
  • Installing a runtime seems to be annoying for Android users, so Adobe is thinking about compiling for Android like for iOS. Which might bring some extra performance as well.
  • I asked Lee Brimelow about AIR on Windows Phone 7 and he said something like “Adobe is currently not working on that and it would be a lot of work”. Well, of course Microsoft is not interested having AIR on their system, but it would be a really important platform for all of us. So in my opinion Adobe at least has a small team checking out what’s possible. What do you think about Windows Phone 7 and AIR support?

Flex Builder 4.5

  • You can get Flex SDK 4.5 already, but there’s also a way to join the private pre-release program to get early access to Flex Builder 4.5. Just visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/flexprerelease. They are working on some useful stuff and it might be a good idea to test some of the new features.
  • Deepa Supramaniam mentioned spark MXML skins have performance issues on mobile devices. That’s why they created pure ActionScript spark skins for mobile applications. Hopefully, within the private beta Flex SDKs, we’ll find some great improvements: http://www.riagora.com/2011/03/preview-of-flex-on-ios/.

NUI

  • Wolfgang Henseler (Talk I missed at FFK10) opened my mind according NUI.
  • Don’t think of apps on mobile devices but of services allowing you reaching your goal faster than a website.
  • Think about providing services, combining them, rethinking them.
  • Use less design and let objects provide their functionalities (e.g. tap on image to get some options).
  • My brain is very busy with that NUI thing. E. g. he mentioned the Siri iPhone app. It’s not about how it looks like (not so cool) but how it works! Combining lots of possibilities with a really easy interface (speech) . He was also talking about “in body technology” (sensors and stuff like that.) and http://www.tedmed.com/
  • After Dennis Ippels Kinect (OpenKinect / http://www.primesense.com/) introduction I finally know something about the magic behind this device as well.

Molehill

Additional useful links: