arkitrave :: log

It’s over. I take off at 6:51 tomorrow morning. This has been a great experience, and I will definitely be back next year.

I was pretty laid back about my approach to the panels today; I didn’t take a lot of notes, and mentally I wasn’t all there after a very late night and four solid days of SXSW…

The Next Generation of Web Apps

The central word of this panel was “iteration.” Mena Trott of SixApart was the most vocal presenter, and in between such statements as “It doesn’t get much smaller than a husband and wife in a bedroom” she actually had a few good things to say. Modern application development needs to iterate more quickly; some apps push a new version every day to every couple weeks. Certainly shorter than the 18-month development cycle of desktop apps.

The panelist from flickr encouraged us to talk to users rather than trying to think like them. They get tons of feedback and they make small, incremental revisions to the product based on that feedback.

Simple apps are also the future - nobody needs all the features of MS Word, and they mostly just get in the way of productivity. This affirmed previous day’s comments by Coudal and Freid. Veen put it this way: boil down something that everyone thinks is already done (like MS Word) - these things are done in an overly complex way. Make them simple. They just did this with Measure Map, and Google just bought it.

There was brief commentary around the idea that user-generated content means that design is becoming “just” a container. One point of view is that this is very exciting; some feel that design being divorced from content in this way is a negative.

Check out chicagocrime.org.

Two additional tidbits to close: Don’t use Greek text for comping, as it divorces the design further from potential content. Use actual content or invented content, but not completely foreign Greeking. Also, be competitive on product quality, not on the lock-in of the user. The user will leave if you suck. They will stay if you’re good. And trying to hold their data hostage or keep them on your site is petty and in the end will bite you.

The Orthley Children and their Computer

Spend a little time at Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. That’s really all there is to say. The man is pretty much an insane genius, there was a band with a banjo and theremin, and a little bit of Ruby code thrown in for good measure. Some people walked out, not getting the humor, but then they’re probably the same people that don’t get Monty Python.

The State of the World

Bruce Sterling. The state of the world.

Conclusions

This has been a fantastic experience. It’s been amazing to put faces to blogs, and to meet and talk with people who I respect a great deal. Most of the panels were quite good, a few were amazing, and the Microformats talk made me really excited about the web again.

However, I miss my beautiful wife and baby, and I’m looking forward to getting back home. I’m a bit more motivated to clean up my act around this site, finally launch a slightly more up-to-date design, and write a bit more often. And I’m looking forward to getting back to work to continue to improve the Fisher-Price website.