Code Zen

Of late I have been involved in a lot of conversations around user experience, especially since the last few months the sessions at the RefreshPhilly group that I am involved in have had quite a number of speakers on that topic. Speakers on UX usually come from a design background which isn’t surprising. The opinion I sometimes find prevalent and which I strongly disagree with though is that user experience is solely a design concern.

A while back, after a rather frustrating day with Javascript, trying (unsuccessfully) to create a rather simple transition effect that would orient the user to a change in state of the application, I vented on twitter on the choice of Javascript for the application given Flash’s general penetration. My main gripe was that while the application would be functional in Javascript, Flash would let me do really interesting transitions and effects, adding a layer of richness to the application. Remember this was an application that didnt have any SEO requirement and the application in that design would be completely unusable from a hand held device (the wont work for iphone argument carries a lot of weight these days).

A friend of mine (whom I hope doesn’t mind being cited here 😉 ) from the creative side of the biz responded:

This is what I feel is one of the biggest misconceptions in our industry. Recently, Grant Skinner, one of my favorite Flash developers, gave a talk at the FITC Amsterdam conference. Though I didn’t attend the conference, I did browse his presentation online. One of his slides had the diagram shown below.

That pretty much hit the nail right on the head. And thats exactly my take on it. I think technology has a huge contribution to user experience. However traditionally that has not really been recognized as much.

The need for Creative Technologists:

I think there is a real need for the Creative Technologist. As technologists we understand whats possible with the current and the cutting edge technologies, which enables us to truly understand the problem statement. More so now when online landscape includes more than just technologies like Java, Flash, etc. What do the new platforms like Facebook, Yahoo Open, OpenID bring to the table? Look at how the labs features in GMail improve user experience.

How about browser extensions like Gears that could let enhance the user experience by letting them take your online content offline for reading later or BrowserPlus that could literally allow you to trigger the speech command on the local operating system and have it read out the content text for him.

And the opinion is not mine alone. Another great read is the article by Dan Harrelson from Adaptive Path (you know, the company that coined the term AJAX) on “What Makes a Design Technologist?” The 4 points he mentions for a creative technologist are:

1. A comfort level with front-end programming (web, desktop, mobile, device)
2. A tool belt filled with techniques for creating interactive apps
3. The ability to quickly pick up new tools
4. A itch to dive into code and “just built it”

And Creative Technologists have started becoming less rare to find on the web. Another article I recently read on the Read Write Web blog was on the fantastic Enjoysthin.gs application built by Ted Roden who is now employed by NYTimes as a Creative Technologist.

While Creative Technologist is still not a title that gets any results in Monster.com, I wonder if that’ll change soon.

Its that time of the month again! RefreshPhilly’s March session in tomorrow with sessions from the Luke Crawford, the CTO of Muxtape as well as by Todd Warfel from MessageFirst on Sketching and Rapid Iterative Design.

If you havent done so, do RSVP on the Facebook event page (we need the names for security passes for the building).

And in related news, Roz recently got interviewed by Technically Speaking on Refresh Philly. Great going Roz! Oh and I am totally stealing Rob Francis‘s badge for the event:

Last night Mumbai suffered what some news reporters called the worst act of terrorism India has ever seen. Mumbai unfortunately, is no stranger to acts of terrorism but these attacks were of a completely different kind, the attackers definitely suicidal who just wanted to kill as many people as they could before they themselves were killed. Even after 24 hours, the drama still is not over with the security forces still trying to rescue people who have either been taken hostage or have been stranded locked up in their rooms.

I was glued to the NDTV live steam for most of the night and since I have woken up this morning, and on tracking the story on search.twitter.com as well as occasionally jumping to BBC news or CNN. My first emotion was anger. Mumbai was my home for a while and its still my favorite city in the world. And to see it virtually being held hostage by these loathsome assholes enraged me. My sentiments towards the government and the security forces were those of sympathy almost, they are trying their best arent they?

But I talked to my brother over chat then and another friend who also often visits Mumbai, and they were less so. The attacks in Mumbai weren’t unexpected, after the recent attacks in other big cities where Mumbai was conspicuously out of the list. Its the job of the government to keep its citizens safe, and it failed miserably this time. While the on site journalists kept insisting that the city will bounce back and take it in its stride, I really hope this wakes us up as a country and makes us ask some serious questions of ourselves and of the people we put into power to make sure things like this don’t happen. Its time we stopped being reactive and “politically correct” and just root the sources of such terror out. Lets stop taking the safe and conventional responses. Give the security agencies more rope and let them go after the core of the threats irrespective of political sensitivities. We need more supercops like KPS Gill

The drama still goes on in Mumbai but I hope this is a wake up call to us all.

I got back from San Francisco this morning taking a couple of extra days at San Francisco to do some tourism. So I figured I’d put down what I had learned this year before the workweek clouded all that to a distant blur.
As usual, MAX was f-ing awesome. I have tried to make it to MAX every year since I graduated and joined the corporate workforce and Comcast has been pretty awesome about making sure I could do that on their dime. This year was no exception and most of the Flash team from CIM was there at MAX as Adobe showed of the cool stuff they have been working on.
My strategy for MAX this year was a little different than earlier. Traditionally I have tried to get deeper into technologies that I work with everyday. This year, with so many new ideas being shown at MAX, I decided to take sessions on the things that I did not work with between 9-5 and would be really easy for me to miss. I have to say it worked out pretty well.
Let me start off by saying: HOLY S**T, the Flash Platform is AWESOME and the pace at which its evolving is just incredible. Below are some of the best sessions I attended this year:

Using C++ Libraries in Flash Player and Adobe AIR
This was definitely one of the best sessions I attended at MAX this year. The session introduced Adobe’s Alchemy project that compiles C++ code to Actionscript bytecode that can be run on the Flash Player just as any bytecode compiled from AS3 code would. The project isn’t mature yet but some of the examples that were shown like ports of C++ OggVorbis codec, motion detection libraries, cryptographic libraries, etc were definitely impressive. I guess its time for me to brush up my C++ ;).

Hands On: Creating Effects with Pixel Bender
I think I got most excited during this lab. Pixel Bender, as a lot of you may know, is a technology that allows developers to write Shaders in a language called Hydra. Hydra is has a C-esque syntax but is really easy since you dont do really complicated logic in it, but rather simple pixel manipulation. These Shaders can then be applied at runtime to Flash DisplayObjects and also be used within Photoshop / AfterEffects as custom Shaders. I had read a bit about this before but the syntax and the prospect of having to learn another language was keeping me away from writing a custom Shader. However, it was really surprising how ridiculously easy this was. Hopefully I’ll write a couple of filters soon and release them on this blog.

Extending Flex Builder
Another awesome session, almost perfect for me. This session introduced the object model that the Flex/Actionscript plugin uses for all the language intelligence within the IDE. The session was really useful since I had a couple of ideas to extend Flex Builder but while I was able to learn about Eclipse itself, I had no knowledge of the details of Flex Builder plugin itself.

Hands On: Getting Started with AfterEffects CS4
Programmatic Animations in AfterEffects with Expressions and Scripting
On day 1, I attended part of the AfterEffects workshop in the morning. I have never worked with AE but have seen some designers I work with come up with some incredible stuff with it. The session was perfect since it taught me enough to now let me go play on my own. Unfortunately I had to get out of that session half way since I had to get to a meeting (yeah I was also working there) but the pace of the session was perfect.
On day 2, I attended another session on programmatic animation in AE. Since most of the animation I do in Flash in programmatic, this really made me map that knowledge to the AE domain. Between these two sessions, I think I really got a lot clearer understanding of AE than before.

Adobe XD: Designing Design
Adobe XD: Building a Next Generation News Reader
I loved the XD sessions. Seeing how they go around developing apps and how they make decisions around user interfaces is always interesting. The session where Jeremy Clark explained the process of developing the New York Times news reader application was particularly informative, where they even showed the process of prototyping interaction design, something I really feel all companies should do more of.

But more than the sessions, it was meeting other attendees that was just plain amazing. I had some amazing conversations around the future of LogBook and OpenPyro with quite a few people I have talked to on twitter and email but seeing them in person was very exciting. These were almost as educational as some of the sessions.

Max 08 was just amazing, and am definitely looking forward to Max 09 in LA.