Interpreting today’s digital landscape and how it is transforming the human experience.
It’s been a great week at Design for Mobile – I’ve heard a lot of great discussions on a number of topics and trends in the mobile space. I really enjoyed the wide variety of content, but here are a few highlights from some sessions: 1. Mobiles in Museums – Nancy Proctor, Director of Mobile, Smithsonian Institute. www.museummobile.info In the digital [...]
Ah, this is a wonderful feeling – one of comradery, creative renewal and utter exhaustion. It’s born only from attending a fantastic conference with phenomenal people, whose passions and ideas stir your inner brainchild into a frenzy, pushing it to explore territory previously unknown. This feeling is why I love 360|Flex so much; it is guaranteed with the ticket price. A big Hoorah! is in order for John and Nicole Wilker as well as all of the volunteers and speakers who make 360|Flex so special.
Yesterday was the first day of the five-day Design For Mobile conference, and what a great first day it was. While the majority of the speakers will be presenting today and tomorrow, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop by Suzanne Ginsberg called “Designing Smartphone Apps,” followed by a Mobile Monday meetup with a presentation by Pek Pongpaet on “Designing for the iPad.” Both presentations were great openers to the conference, along with workshops I didn’t get to attend by Luke Wroblewski and Nader Nejat.
In the race to get things done faster and cheaper, it pays to understand the ramifications of my actions. It’s irresponsible of me to allow external pressure of any kind to force me into creating a code base I can’t deliver with absolute confidence when working on a long-life project for a client. While I may be long gone and working on something else, other engineers are going to have to live with that code base and will suffer the consequences of whatever technical debt I incur, and my reputation will go with them. It’s my responsibility as a software engineer and a creative consultant to leave them in the best possible place, even if that means missing a deadline. A stitch in time saves nine; it’s sometimes better to miss a deadline now than rush it and leave my client with a codebase doomed to fall apart several iterations from now.
It’s been a great first day for 360Flex (running through Wednesday in Washington, D.C.)! One of the major highlights was Doug McCune’s talk on keeping sane by allowing yourself time for creativity. Through his work with Spatial Key, Doug has been exploring quite a few sides to data visualization. You see, he loves the idea of visual metaphor and generating worlds from information sets where no previous world existed. This re-purposing of data creates new relationships between ideas that may not have been evident prior.
Quantifying attributes to describe those successful in the digital space is difficult at best. For those who are successful in today’s digital arena, what comes to mind is the term polymath: a person whose expertise spans a significant number of subject areas.
My co-worker and I recently debated PNG compression for the iPhone: Should you bundle Fireworks source assets in xcode for quick editing and recompiling, or should you export compressed versions to use for the bundling phase?
