Sound of Noise

from Update feed http://www.listal.com/movie/sound-of-noise

The Bourne Legacy

from Update feed http://www.listal.com/movie/untitled-jason-bourne-project

There’s a few entries over at ias12-davidmead.tumblr.com, but not many. The reason for this is that the one electronic device I took, my phone, died on me.

The galling thing was that it electronically it still worked, but the touch screen was completely unresponsive. So, only a day into it, and I was completely disconnected (in a way) from the other 649 attendees.

As the conference proceeded I tended to notice a lot more people interacting with their devices than being completely engaged with the subject of the talk, or even the people they were talking to during the breaks.

I found myself taking a lot more notes (shout out to Veronica for her sketchnoting talk), and talking to a few more people than I normally would (I’m fairly shy by nature).

So without my phone I found I was more focused, but also adrift. Not being able to arrange to meet in the breaks, or for dinner was…uncomfortable. Being completely reliant on the phone in my hotel room or the internet on the rooms TV was jarring, and that loss of immediacy was quite odd.

When I ventured out to wander around the French Quarter I found this to be the case too. It felt like that bit in a sci-fi film when the protagonist realized everyone around him is “one of them”!

My replacement phone arrived the day after I got back.  I think I’ll try and get into the habit of switching my phone into ‘Airplane mode’ while I’m in meetings/talks. Remove the temptation. But maybe take a back-up (like an iPod Touch or a Netbook) just in case.

Now all I have to to is transcribe my notes over to Tumblr and I’ll be good to go.

Jesus Henry Christ

from Update feed http://www.listal.com/movie/jesus-henry-christ-2011

1. Design in Photoshop/Fireworks
2. Code-up design
3. Integrate a CMS
4. Drop in the content from a Word doc
5. Test in desktop browsers
6. Launch

Believe me it was never that simple, but from a 50,000ft view the work generally fell into those buckets in that order. And you hardly backtracked. Once the design was locked you really never looked at it again. After all, it was the design and the client had signed-off on it.

We’ve been doing this for a while now and we’ve learnt a lot.  The more discussions I read online the more roundabout it seems to become. Now I see the approach is more:

• Collect, then divide content into content types
• Structure content using POSH and employ something like OOCSS
• Think mobile first
• Test on multiple devices
• Re-structure content using POSH & OOCSS
• Create design elements in Photoshop/Fireworks
• Look at implementing a responsive design
• Integrate a CMS
• Test on multiple devices
• Launch

Of course mixed throughout this is persona creation, usability testing, information architecture, and user experience.  These things were around before, but now they seem more “baked in”.  Also the design, in my mind, becomes less up-front, though not less important.  There’s just a lot more stuff to do before you put those full color prints in front of the client.

Sound of Noise

from Update feed http://www.listal.com/movie/sound-of-noise

The exciting challenges

In the years that I started working in this emerging web industry, it always felt we were building sand castles right on the surf line – Netscape & Internet Explorer kept vying to be top dog by introducing propriety stuff.  Clients demanded their pages look the same everywhere, and print agencies (that were rapidly re-inventing themselves) were happy to oblige.

After wading through the ‘browser wars’, a couple of bubbles, the rise of ”Web2.0′, and the mass adoption of “social media”, things seemed to be settling down.  The web started to seem less of a fractured and scary place and now ran fairly smoothly.  Browsers, for the most part, interpret HTML, CSS, and Javascript the same way. Video & audio streamed easily and very few people worry about tying up phone lines thanks to the spread of WiFi.

Even the slow explosion of “mobile” didn’t seem to really ruffle us.  We knew the hacks, understood that we’d catch up with the technology sooner rather than later. But that word, “mobile”, is a Trojan Horse.  It’s a buzzword used to get agreement for doing stuff on phones “because everyone has one nowadays”. But its bigger than that – Much bigger.

I’m running for a bus

Mobile isn’t the business man checking bus times as he hops off the train. It isn’t the mom-on-the-go updating Facebook in the checkout line. It isn’t the teen checking into Starbucks on Foursquare. It isn’t an iPhone, Kindle, or Android tablet.

What is it then? It’s the expectation to interact with anything, anywhere, anytime.

Our websites, what we currently have, aren’t ready for that.  They don’t, can’t, adapt quick enough.  Responsive Design is a good step forward, but its not the answer.  We have to radically take a look at what we’re producing and re-shape that.  Think about the Internet rather than the Web.

Fun fact - eBay claims they sell 3-4 Ferraris on their mobile app each month.  Mobile app, so that’s the running business man, or the on-the-go mum right? Wrong. It’s people, richer than I, spending concentrated time researching & executing big decisions on the nearest device they have. And as adoption of apps on to devices other than smartphones starts to rise we will have less control on where they do this.  The expectation is I can browse on my phone, swap to my tablet for a better view, all using my home WiFi, then send it to my work laptop/desktop for later consumption if I wanted.

My tablet is my keyboard

Consider this.  Browsing, at home, on my tablet there’s images I want to see bigger.  At the moment there’s a lot of pinching & zooming. What if, with a gesture, I could move it from the tablet to my TV. Use that 50″ inch HD display to show it in all its glory. When I fill in the order form for it, the tablet then becomes my keyboard. Now I pull it back from my TV onto the tablet and continue browsing. How’s our “responsive” design going to handle that?

How about I clip a recipe into Evernote from work and my fridge is already adding ingredients I don’t have to a shopping list in my Tesco‘s account, which my wife can view realtime on the fridge.

If I were to write that 5 years ago it would’ve been pie-in-the-sky. Now, I reckon we may see it before the year’s out.

The web is suddenly becoming fractured and scary again.  Its a broken internet of things, a whole slew of connected devices on which we expect to read/view/listen/post/tweet/interact with the exact same content with being barred, redirected or forced to buy an app.

We’re in a better place now. But it’s not about hacks and catching up with versions of Webkit.  It’s about the “big think”, knowing the context, understanding the expectation.  In other words, all the exciting stuff that made building those sandcastles on the surf line before, put a smile on your face.

type=”number”

One of the new HTML5 form options is the number attribute for input fields. This goes hand-in-hand with other attributes such as tel, email, etc. to help define the type of things we’re capturing with those elements.  This gets us away from the general type="text" attribute we’ve been used to for so long.  The other bonus using this attribute is when someone uses it on a touch device it’ll fire a numeric keypad, making it the perfect tool to capture Social Security and credit card numbers. Right?

Well, no. There have been a few hiccups along this Nirvana path for the number attributes use:

1. Apple’s iOS5 introduced separating commas into the field on devices running it
2. The field contains a spinner which increases the number entered by one digit each time
3. It doesn’t always show the “right” numeric keypad on touch devices

I think this comes from mis-understanding exactly what the W3C saw this being used for.  The spec states it is “a precise control for setting the element’s value to a string representing a number“.  The key words they use here are control and string.

Maybe type=”text” isn’t too bad

There’s been a lot of discussion (at work and online) around how to get the “right” keypad to fire, and how to rid ourselves of the separator commas. But I fear this is, as I mentioned on Rob Tarr’s post, us misunderstanding an HTML element such as we used to do with <address>.

So until, as Rob & I suggested in the comments of his post, a different type or additional attribute comes along, we really should not be trying to bend the number attribute to our will.

You see the W3C sees telephone as “Text with no line breaks”.  It is not a number. The same would probably be said for credit card information.  That’s why type=text still works. I’ll be promoting Brad‘s suggestion of using the pattern attribute to display a numeric keypad for touch devices from now on those particular fields.

Now I just have to wait for a time where I need to create a form for the user to “set the element’s value to a string representing a number” and I’ll know what element to use

You see I wasn’t that bothered by the ads, or even by the hunting. The real reason was it became so damn difficult to do anything. The continuous barrage of “upgrades” that were pushed, and multiple windows spawned every-time I clicked a link. But I only went in a few times  year so I was still dithering.

Luckily, GoDaddy’s involvement in the completely misguided H.R. 3261 bill (SOPA) was the final nail-in-the-coffin and, gave me a financial incentive with some companies offering transfer discounts.

Looking around I chose to go with hover.com, whom I heard about on a podcast (B2W I think). I can’t say enough good things about the service I got. Called them up and someone answered, no automated menu, and a couple of questions later they did the transfers for me. Awesome!

Hover still has a discount code of ‘SOPA’ which will get you a transfer for only $9 (until 1/31/12).

Being released in 2012 its one of things that could be (and is) easily dismissed by some quarters, but warmly embraced in others. In this age of faster mobile what could we want with a something like a till receipt printed for us.  The appeal to people like Josh, Warren, and Jeremy is that physical connection with the day-to-day digital world we inhabit.

Is this the first step to a realized ”papernet“? Maybe. This future seems quintessentially British, and the idea of having my digital flotsam printed off in a form that fits right into my Slimmy wallet for that morning coffee sits well with me.