Live The Rich Web Experience
This must be Web 2.0 season because web conferences are in full swing. I will be speaking at The Rich Web Experience in San Jose in September. My talk currently steps through a few key UI elements on the Netflix site and goes through the history and realities of how they came to be. I’m thinking about changing up the talk for RWE to step through more design pattern examples than before and highlight the pros and cons of the various approaches. This will still focus primarily on the data-driven development practices, but it will also shed some light on the more subtle aspects of good (and bad) design principles. It’s a 90 minute session, so there is plenty of time to experiment a bit. I’ll post more once I actually have some slides done :).
Register using the code: nfjs2007speaker200 and you will get a $200 discount.
Three Days of Everything Ajax
After three days of the web development community talking about anything and everything Ajax, the Ajax Experience conference came to a close. Overall, it was a good time, and it was fun to catch up with everyone from the last couple TAEs.
The conference was held at The Grand Hyatt on Union Square in San Francisco. The rooms were quite nice, however the layout of the social areas of the hotel made it difficult to meet up with people by chance. This is something that the Boston TAE was awesome at. Luckily I run into Brent Ashley on the night before the conference, and I had a chance to get a drink and find out about the projects he has been working on. I think this was the only chance meeting that I had outside the main conference area and in the hotel. I did run into Brent again the following night while a few of us were at the Starlight Room on Wed. night following the TAE cocktail reception.
The conference got into swing with Ben and Dion’s State of Ajax talk that highlighted the growth that Ajax has seen over the past year. It was a good talk, but it was missing some of the great back and forth that Ben and Dion are masterful at delivering.
Some of my favorite sessions included both talks from Bill Scott, Joe Hewitt’s talk on IUI, Doug Crockford’s talk on the good parts of JavaScript, and Steve Souder’s talk on YSlow.
Bill Scott’s Anti-Patterns talk had some great points. One of my favorites was the Borg Idiom pattern that cautioned on having one strong pattern, such as a tree structure or drag-and-drop could set an expectation with users that the pattern be carried across the entire site. This could unintentionally start driving the way other pages are designed, and if not carefully thought out, could end up painting a web UX architecture into a corner. Bill’s experiment that he is calling ProtoKit looks promising for doing quick interactive prototyping.
While I was leaving Bill’s Anti-Pattern talk, I did come across on one of the tables, a note. Apparently Bill has some serious fans out there. 🙂
The panel discussions were pretty good, and very deep on the future direction of JavaScript, complete with strong disagreements on how things should move forward. It makes me wonder, at what point should I really worry about how JavaScript will work in 8 years. How different will the web be at that point, and will a proprietary technology such as Silverlight change the game again? Doug did make it clear that the group of people gathered in the main room at TAE were working to change the web, and the work is important. I wish the rest of the conference was able to carry that same message.
Steve Souder’s YSlow talk was my favorite of the conference. It has been a long time coming for a book devoted entirely to front-end performance and it was exciting to hear that High Performance Web Sites will do just that. It details 14 best practices for making web pages faster. Also, the new YSlow FireBug plugin gives one-stop shopping for monitoring the 14 client-side performance indicators. I hope that this tool will help the web get faster by making performance techniques front-and-center to daily development, and not just occasional checkups.
iPhone Review – Two Weeks In
About two weeks ago I got my team an iPhone so that we could fix some web bugs, mess around with it some and see what neat things it could do. I knew that when I first turned it on I’d want to share my thoughts here, but instead I tried to see how it would possibly fit within my daily life first, and find the real wins and/or frustrations.
Everything about the experience of buying the iPhone, opening it up and activating it was painless. There were no lines at the Apple store and during my ten minutes in the store, nobody else was buying an iPhone, even with a pretty good crowd in the store overall.
Once I brought it home and opened it, the iPhone was the first thing to be seen; no install cheat-sheet, foam insert, or anything else; just the phone. The only stumble along the way for me came after activating the phone, the AT&T Edge network wasn’t available for data transmission for the first 10 hours or so.
As expected, the touchscreen features were very cool, and for the most-part, very intuitive. Using the menu navigation felt natural with nothing more than a couple nit corners that will never affect any sort of daily iPhone use. The only feature that would really be nice is some sort of application switching functionality. Moving between the web, mail, ipod and anything else requires returning to the home screen first.
During the two-week test run, it became clear that the best parts of the iPhone are the iPod, the web browsing and the video quality. Checking email on Yahoo! Mail is pretty painless. Overall, anything that is read-only or point-and-navigate all work wonderfully. It definitely provides a “this is easy and fun” first impression.
It gets a bit more challenging when trying to type on the keyboard. I much prefer typing on the keyboard in the landscape mode that is available in the web browser. The “keys” are a bit further apart and the amount of typos is minimized. The landscape mode is not available when sending emails. Also, once the keyboard is launched in portrait mode, it doesn’t do that oh-so-cool rotation when the iPhone is turned 90-degrees. In comparison to a BlackBerry, I find typing to be much easier with a physical keyboard. Switching between text, numbers and special characters doesn’t seem as challenging on the Blackberry, even though it is the same amount of keystrokes to make it happen on both devices.
Using the Safari web browser is as close to a PC experience as I have ever seen on a handheld device. Double-tapping to zoom a text block or picture, or doing the dough-stretching behavior is very intuitive, and makes reading the web pages a breeze. Using wifi makes it pretty quick as well. Occasionally I find myself browsing the web on the iPhone instead of getting up to go across the room to my PC. This will certainly change the mobile web landscape forever.
While sitting at the airport browsing the web, I found a great article on the New York Times website that I wanted to email a friend of mine. Cut-and-paste the URL. Oops, there isn’t a cut-and-paste feature! My Blackberry, with it’s primitive web browser can do this fairly painlessly. I couldn’t do it on the iPhone and which was both surprising and disappointing. For it to be a serious productivity device, that will need to be added.
Since the iPhone is not really my mobile phone, I have had limited use of it as a phone. I have made a couple calls with it and found that the speaker phone is really lacking as it is incredibly quiet. It can’t be used with any sort of ambient noise, such as in my backyard that is directly adjacent to the freeway with only a sound wall for noise protection. The proximity sensor near the ear piece turns off the display when it is held to your ear. This is pretty slick. Looking at the display again turns it on without pressing any buttons. Very nice.
The video quality of watching The Office downloaded off iTunes was amazing. Keeping a couple shows on the iPhone for those commutes on the train, or quick plane hops across the state is something I could see myself doing. I just need to remember to bring the actual iPhone earbuds next time since my noise-cancelling headphones didn’t fit into the jack on the iPhone.
Overall, I think the iPhone is a slick consumer device. For the occasional email and heavy ipod and web browsing I think it’s great. For other professional-type applications and heavy data use that requires typing, the next rev is worth holding out for. It is a device that can easily fit within a device lover’s lifestyle, and it is the first time I have ever found browsing the web on a phone enjoyable.
I do wonder when the first iPhone cold weather gloves will come out with a flip open thumb/index finger for all those new owners in New York.
I’ll probably have more to review in the next few weeks, more on the developer side of the coin.
Presenting this Friday
The Ajax Experience conference is going on this week in San Francisco, and it should be a great time! The last couple were great for getting developers, framework authors and luminaries from places like Yahoo, Mozilla, and Microsoft together. The caliber of speakers has always been incredible, and I have met many very talented folks in the Ajax community both times.
Friday I’ll be presenting at the conference with an updated version of the talk I gave in Boston. I’ll still be discussing the development process, with a focus on qualitative and quantitative testing. It details some of the challenges that we have had in developing some of the Ajax features on the Netflix site and shows some very current examples. It’s a great talk for anyone that is looking to find out a bit more about Netflix and see how our data-driven approach to development shapes the user experience. I hope to see you there!
Sean Kane 
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