Wow, cant believe its that time already.
2010 was a pretty great year for me. In Nov 2009 I moved to the User Experience team hoping to be the voice of technology as new projects were conceived and features enhanced. So the year began with me learning the workings of the UX team which was fascinating. The creative process is, not surprisingly, very different from the engineering one, and sitting in those sessions was ridiculously educational. CIM has some pretty fantastic Design and IA folks and I got to learn quite a bit on concepts such as Mental Models, Task oriented design, User Persona’s etc. I also ended up reading a few books on my new role (of which About Face might be the best one, and I recommend it strongly to anyone in the UX/UI domain) which I never would have done if I hadn’t moved to this team.
Suffice to say, if the year needed to be summarized in a word, it would be “educational” 🙂
Around Feb, I also got involved in a prototype for the project that is now the Xfinity iPad app. As a UX prototyper, I was on the 3 people big prototype team that built the demo that was shown at the NCTA event. After that I ended up working with the brand new Advanced Engineering Team as we rushed to get the final product out of the door. My role in the team was not UX really, but implementation. After the initial learning curve of Objective C, I got pretty comfortable with it and actually realized that user interface frameworks and technologies are pretty similar even with syntactical differences. I wrote about the whole Xfinity App development experience here. In the last few months, I have returned to prototyping but these days they have all been functional additions to the iPad app itself.
While I didn’t write as much code for it as the iPad, I have also become extremely passionate about the Android platform. While less polished than its i-Cousin, the deeper I look into the architecture the more awesome it seems. I built a couple of apps for internal demos that ran on Android (in Java) and that was fun. I feel less proficient in the Android UI framework than in UIKit, just by virtue of time spent developing on it, but its something I hope to get better at next year. The Android world definitely lacks the sexy factor that is going on with the iDevices, and I am really hoping that changes both with upcoming OS updates and developer community maturity. I also played around with AIR for Android a little and it seems pretty decent. I am working on a project using that now. The biggest thing that has going for it is not just the familiarity of ActionScript but also the tooling of the Flash IDE. As much flak as it gets, the Flash IDE is rather fantastic for dropping visual assets for an app. I really wish AIR for Android played nicer with the core Android framework, though there are ways of doing that as mentioned in this post by Elad Erom.
EspressoReader, my AIR app for consuming news (currently as a Google Reader client) continues to evolve. Just building something like that has made me learn so much about the way we consume information. It has also gotten me hooked on books on collective intelligence and text analysis. I will release a new version in the coming weeks that I am really excited about. So if you haven’t tried the app out yet, give it a try by installing it from this link to the Adobe AIR Marketplace.
I ended up travelling for work quite a bit this year, attending some pretty fantastic conferences like the NCTA Cable Show, the Web 2.0 Summit and TechCrunch Disrupt. This is a change for me, as these were more about the business and strategy than my usual fare of tech conferences. From my schedule in Jan, looks like this will continue. Btw, I am heading over to CES so if you are heading there as well, send me a holler 🙂
Finally, looking ahead, 2011 seems to be at a great start. There are a lot of changes afoot which I’d love to share soon. So stay tuned 🙂
Code Zen 