WDN09
October 30It's that time again, but things are a little different. Web Directions North returns for another year of conferencing and skiing in early February, but it's now taking place in Denver, Colorado. And I'm not involved. Well I am, kind of, but...
One day I intend to sit down and write up the trials and tribulations, the things I've learned, and some of the fantastic experiences I've had over the past few years as one of the primary organizers of what, by almost all accounts, was a fantastic set of web conferences. Suffice it to say that building WDN with John, Maxine, and Derek was one of the highlights of my professional career thus far.
But it was also a lot of work. So much work. After the first year in 2007 I had suspicions, then the frenzy of activity leading up to the second year in early 2008 really confirmed it: running an event of this size is a full time job, and it's not the sort of work I want to be doing long term. Though it turns out I'm actually quite good at event planning (who knew?), that alone didn't feel like enough reason to ignore the stress of making ticket sales or the difficulty in turning away long term clients for a few months out of every year. So, I had an honest talk with the others, wished them luck, and decided to bow out for future years.
And that's it really. Sorry to be boring, there wasn't a big dramatic falling out and we still get along great. In fact John asked me to come speak in Denver, and I'm happy to be doing so. At the very least it should prove an interesting reversal to sit back and enjoy the conference this year, without the prior stress of putting it all together.
So if you want to come join us, and I think you should because John has pulled out all the stops to build a really compelling program with a lot of exciting speakers, go sign up now and take an additional $50 off the ticket price you're at it with the code WDN09DSh.
Shutter
October 15Here's an idea. Take a great product with one glaringly flawed feature, put together an application that exploits the awfulness of that feature in a few brilliantly simple ways, and then sell it for a few bucks.
Something like a month ago, a $5 app called CameraBag hit the iPhone app store. I read the description, took the risk and bought it. I turns out it's no more complicated than a few pre-built filters that will take a typically crappy photo with the iPhone's camera (or let you choose one from your library) and make it look as if it were taken from one of a variety of classic low-quality cameras. You've got your Lomo, Holga, 1970's faded and yellowing print, high-contrast B&W, infrared, and a few more (though you'll find the first two as "Lolo" and "Helga" in the menu, for trademarks reasons naturally).
It's basic, it's slow (the filters take a while to render), the already-low iPhone image quality doesn't hold up at large sizes after the filter, and it's nothing I couldn't do on my own in Photoshop. But I love it for being so simple, and doing such a good job at making lemonade out of the iPhone's lemon. It turns one of the phone's most obvious flaws into a desirable feature. Almost.
I put CameraBag to the test on my way out for lunch in Vancouver's Chinatown last week. Here are some selected photos from the full set on Flickr.
Zoom
October 7Somehow over the last year or two we've landed in a situation where most browsers now default to full page zoom instead of traditional text-resizing.
Opera has long used zoom instead of text scaling; as of IE7 Internet Explorer uses zoom to replace the older resizing method; Firefox 3 now defaults to zoom as well. Safari is really the only holdout at this point (and I suppose Chrome by extension, since they both run the same WebKit rendering engine) but, oh look, it's coming soon to a future release.
Now it's true that Firefox and Internet Explorer still offer the ability to scale text as they always have, but a user has to look for it; if there's anything we've learned from that latter browser it's that users aren't inclined to change default choices on their computers, so I think it's safe to assume most users will employ the newer method, if at all.
The implications on a designer are fairly dramatic; page zoom is an attempt to continue accurately rendering the page as it was designed, whereas text scaling simply reflows the text, often causing serious layout problems. With full page zoom, the responsibility for ensuring page integrity and legibility is moved out of the designer's hands, and placed fully on the browser. With text resizing, the designer needs to be conscientious of the ways their layout will break at different text sizes, and compensate accordingly.
So, personal preference aside, I wonder whether designing around scaling text is still a skill we need to hold on to, and for how long. I'd be interested in hearing about reasons for and against, as I'm sure there will be both.
