090708udells02_flickr
Originally uploaded by Matt Buedel
He’s just a not a little baby anymore. I don’t blog much about my family, but I just love this shot taken by my friend Matt. What a nice photo. My boy, Liam, now 19 months old said “football” for the first time this weekend and he really likes to watch with me. How cute. Like father like son, I guess.
Many thanks to those who made it out to the CD2 users group meeting last night and checked out my presentation. After a bit of pizza and soda, we got started and covered a lot of ground. I think we had a good discussion afterwards. It was great. As promised, I thought I would share the presentation notes. Here they are in PDF and Keynote formats. Enjoy.
Many many thanks to the organizers of CD2, Anthony, Corey, Sandra, David, etc… I was very happy to be invited to speak!
Hopefully this weekend, I’ll get a chance to post the reading list as promised. This week has taken a toll on me. Even with the 4 day work week, I have taught 3 classes, driven to Chicago and back and had the first week of school for Sophia, so, I’m pretty beat… check in in a couple of days. I’ll post them then.
In the ever growing trend of Moo card mania (most recently Aral Balkan and David Stone), I bought some of the pint sized beauties. I’ll be handing them out at the CD2UG meeting. They feature customized mini prints of my CoolerKreator compositions. Come one, come all (but please RSVP, here). Take a look…
Hope to see you there!
A few months ago, I was interviewed by a local TV station for a tech interest segment on mashups. I spoke with Tim McGinnis, the reporter featured in this clip and really had a good time. It was a short piece, but I still really enjoyed getting my couple minutes on the tube. My wife’s grandfather, (now 90!), saw me and immediately called her. The call went something like this:
Grandpa:“Chad’s on TV!”
Renee:“Yeah, we just saw that. Pretty cool, huh?”
Grandpa:“What the hell was he talking about?”
Renee:“I have no idea, either.”
I laughed.
Bradley is back in session. I have two classes I’m teaching this semester, so it’s going to be a busy one. MM365 ‚Äì Designing with Web Standards, this is one I have taught for 3 years now. It’s focused around CSS, XHTML and some simple JS, with an emphasis on using best practives and writing markup that validates. It’s a great class and one that serves the students pretty well. After that on Tuesdays, I am very happy to teach my MM491 ‚Äì Mashups and RIAs class… This is going to be great. I have a group of students I will be helping to learn Flex, AJAX and using Webservices to make web mashups… what gets better than that?
While I prepare for that (I have to build a few presentations, stat!), why don’t you take some time and watch this video that was taken at 360Flex’s keynote… It has some hot Thermo action in it at about 45:00. Hot stuff, indeed.
Though many of you may have seen this already, I would be remiss in not showing the rest of the readers here this amazing new interface concept from Adaptive Path and The Mozilla Labs.
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
This video was released a couple of weeks ago and represents some key concepts that are sure to come to fruition sooner rather than later. The fact that the browser serves as the primary user interface that is interacted with in the system is pretty similar to how many users are just now working with their PCs today. This trend is sure to continue with the move towards RIA and other semi connected technology. Many people simply don’t need any app that can’t be done as well or even better online than as a desktop binary app.
In addition to this basic use case, there is a significant interface advancement depicted in the video worth noting. The 3D spacial view shown is like Apple’s Time Machine but for all content, contacts and communications that have taken place in the user’s recent history. I want this now! I frequently use the “recent items” menu for apps, files, iChat conversations and server connections. The spacial view’s clustering functionality is a “stack”-like way of grouping content and other interactions by their subject matter and is so very very needed. I currently have a desktop with about 30-40 files and folders containing more content, some of them 3-4 levels deep with associated. All of these are related in some way to a project or series of otherdocuments I have in my user Documents directory… you can imagine how overgrown this gets from time to time. With a loose, time-based virtual association like this, the arbitrary location of the files is removed from your view, supplanting the need for spatial orientation with something more compatible with how your memory works.
Again, if you haven’t dug into the blog posts by the Adaptive Path team and you fancy yourself interested in UI design, you owe it to yourself to take a couple hours to read this series of posts. Is this how it will be? How far is this type of UI off in the future? Well, if you look back to Sun’s excellent StarFire concept, which I blogged about here, some things in it may never happen. It certainly doesn’t hurt to entertain the thoughts of how it could be, though.
The Oslo meeting that determined that ECMAScript 4 will not be the next generation of JavaScript, has been blogged extensively lately. Grant Skinner, Mike Chambers, John Resig, Hank Williams, and Ryan Stewart have all weighed in on this along with Dave McAllister on the Open at Adobe team. A good lengthy description on the groups decision is here in a letter to the Es4 list. It appears the namespaces and packages features of ECMAScript 4, among others were not palatable to a few members on the board, so the more advanced spec of ECMAScript 4 is being shelved to make way for the more incremental update of ECMAScript 3.1 instead. You can get the nitty gritty details on that in this Google Spreadsheet.
While this is not a big deal for the future of Flash as a viable and valuable development platform in professional circles (Adobe has already stating they will not backpedal and cutback on AS3 or AS4′s current or future features because of this decision), this does affect academia and even ongoing professional development from a pedagogical standpoint, effectively cutting off Actionscript 3 as a natural progression/extension of client side scripting to teach students and to serve as a bridge to higher level languages and vice versa. ECMA Script 4 simply served as a better path to bring students into OOP and high-level languages. The change is subtle, no doubt. It does, however, water down the linkage between the languages in a school curriculum. This does open the door for Processing.org’s Applet Development tool, Processing, to serve as a better fit for this purpose in a development learning progression. What do other instructors out think on this? I’d like to hear it.
Furthermore, this exchange serves as yet another opening salvo in browser wars 2.0. With no clear path to HTML5, the next XHTML spec still in limbo, and no real uptake by browser developers on CSS3, it’s only fitting that the behavioral layer’s future get neutered in order to serve MS and stagnate the web again. Adobe and Mozilla already had functional VMs that would run ECMA script 4, so it seems apparent to many out there that this is a stonewalling on MS’s part to buy time to build a new engine, or block ECMAScript’s advancement in general. It looks like that the W3C may very well need to create another new task force (ala The Dreamweaver TaskForce) to get things moving before they get locked up again like in 1999.
This “Harmony”, as the compromise seems to have been called, looks to be more of a placation to me.
Yes… here is the video that ensures that Obama can’t win in November. The GOP will use any means they can to besmirch him. This is pure mudslinging politics at it’s worst… Just watch:
Ouch!
cd2 is a new user group in the Chicago area that is focused on nurturing the collaboration between designers & developers and the importance of the user experience. I’m proud to be speaking at their next gathering on September 3rd. From the site:
Designers Are From Venus, Developers Are From Mars
Where’s the love? Well, often when two coworkers from very different backgrounds are expected to work together, it can be tough to find. Designers and developers can indeed get along with a little foresight on process and understanding of the obstacles along the project’s path. Join Chad Udell in discovering some of those key differences and learn how to overcome them in order to create a blissful state of collaboration.
You can check out the site for the rest of the details here. Many thanks to the people at CD2UG for inviting me to speak to the rest of the members. I’m looking forward to the opportunity. I encourage you to visit their site and RSVP.
A rambling yet somehow strangely coherent spiel on how America’s graphic heritage is being washed away by FastSigns and other commoditized design factories. Some good points here, and it looks as though there is a lot more to come. Warning… the language is a tad NSFW.