Beyond the page - Fullfrontal 2011

Well what an amazing experience fullfrontal was this year. Had lots of fun doing the talk once I got my computer to display the slides (sorry about that). Big thank you to Remy for giving me the opportunity to speak and for putting on Fullfrontal.

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View more presentations from Glenn Jones.

Drag and drop demo’s from the talk

Web Intents /> I had lots of positive feedback about web intents, I am trying to put together a UX/design workshop in early January to help build community involvement in its development. I will be posting and tweeting more information about that in the near future.

The Web Intents demo

PeopleStore /> Quite a few people asked me about PeopleStore, am I going to make it into a product or open source it? At the moment it is still a just side project and a playground for new ideas, so sorry it’s not public. That said, after such a lot of interest I am rethinking what to do with this project. If you’re interested in code examples from PeopleStore take a look at the codebits section of this site, a lot of features are explored there.

 

My hi-lights from this year’s talks:

You gotta do what you gotta do /> Was lucky enough to sit with Marcin Wichary during the speakers meal and hear first-hand about his work at Google. I loved the slide deck built completely in HTML and the fact that he linked Safari and Chrome together over sockets to get accelerometer data he needed for just one small part of his presentation. I think the most interesting thing about Marcin’s talk was all the small insights he gave about the design process needed to come up with ideas for the Google search page.

CoffeeScript Design Decisions /> Jeremy Ashkenas talk on CoffeeScript really made me want to try it out. I have a fundamental dislike of any language/abstraction that is designed to write another language. Jeremy’s overview of the architectural ethos of CoffeeScript made me believe it could be a possible exception to my rule. Some of the features they have added to CoffeeScript go to the heart of everyday problems I have with JavaScript. The talk also pointed out how much room there is for improvements to JavaScript itself.

Excessive Enhancement – Are we taking proper care of the Web? /> Phil Hawksworth talk focused on the central issue of just because we can do something does not mean we should. One of his other main themes is something I often talk about with designers/developers which is having a respect for the medium we work in. At art college we used the term “go with the grain” in its widest sense this meant to fully understand the properties of a medium and work to bring them out to their full potential. ubelly.com have done a write up of Phil’s talk which is worth a read.

Brendan Dawes has infectious passion /> I have seen Brendan speak at a few events over the years and he has an infectious passion for innovation and experimentation that just has to be admired. It’s so interesting to see his love for the design of physical objects move him in new directions. I hope I get to see him talk again as I never seem to get bored of hearing about his adventures in design. ubelly.com also interviewed Brendon

Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture /> Nicholas Zakas took us all on a tour of the concepts of module code architecture and how to loosely-couple JavaScript. These ideas are so important to any complex project, yet the nature of JavaScript use on the web today means we often cut many corners in our code design. Note to self: review this slide deck again before starting large JavaScript projects.

Code editing /> Marijn Haverbeke and Rik Arends both did talks on the various aspects of online code editing. I cannot even begin to imagine the effort that it takes to develop one of these code editing environments, they look very impressive. Might be time to put down Visual Studio and move over to a hosted application for code editing. Hope they have drag and drop support />

Links

  • Data Portability
  • JavaScript
  • Microformats
  • webintents