SXSW 2007

March 12th 2007 Posted to General

This is kind of a weird post to start up with after almost a year of silence, but I guess you have to start somewhere.

So here I sit at SXSW. I was all kinds of excited to come after having some great experiences last year. The best being seeing Kathy Sierra talk on Creating Passionate Users, which completely changed my outlook on just about everything.

This year… it seems to be rather blah. Let me step through it…

Saturday

  • A Decade of Style
    This is where I really started thinking that I hate the moderated panels. One person asks seemingly random questions, and the rest answer. Questions such as “when did you first encounter CSS”, “why did you stick with it”. How in the heck does this help educate me? What am I really suppposed to learn and take away from such questions? This panel did get to a little bit of good questions at the end like where should we be going, what advances need to be made… but it was too little too late to save the panel for me.
  • After the Brief: A field Guide to Design Inspiration
    Good stuff. Well thought out presentation that explained where they (Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert) go to get their inspiration. Ideas on what I can do to get myself out of the box and come up with new things. Yes!! Teach me!! Get away from the computer… do things manually… do it differently then you normally would. Bring it!!
  • Kathy Sierra Opening Remarks
    Love Kathy Sierra. This year wasn’t as ground breaking as last year was for me. She did focus in more on a specific subject (making a better help section for users) then the general “creating passionate users” from last year, but it still had a lot of great nuggets. In a nutshell… users going to the help aren’t the happy people we may be targeting. They are frustrated, angry people. So make a section that will address these users needs, not the guy who is just curious about what is going on.
  • Grids are Good and How to Design with Them
    So so. The logic on how to come up with a grid based on a fixed requirement (in this case the dimensions of an advertisement) was good. Some of the stuff they did with the grid was good. Well prepared, but just not super engaging for me.
  • Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad
    Pretty good… for a 101 level chat. This is the panel that made some of us think that they need to have a classification system for each class. Is it a beginner, intermediate or advanced class on the given subject. The descriptions of what will be discussed can be interpreted many different ways. This one did what it said, but at a semi-superficial level. It seems that most classes here are beginner level, which does fit probably 90% of the participants. I just wish I stopped getting sucked into a cool topic, only to find that I’m not going to learn anything new on it.
  • Mapping: Where the F#*% Are We Now?
    No where close to what I thought it would be. Talked about pie in the sky communication of GPS with Bluetooth and other oddities. So this is the inverse of the above, that I needed to know it was way above my level… and wasn’t going to tell me what I could do cool today. I bailed early on this one, as my eyes were glazing over.

Anyway… that was just the first day. I’m on day 3 now and the same pattern follows… moderated panels can actually suck the life from you. Classes are largely “nerfed” for the majority.

But the people… what about the people?

So SXSW is also supposed to be about the networking. All these A-listers are here, and by all accounts are very approachable. I just don’t know what we’d talk about. Last year I said hey to Shaun Inman, and asked how Mint was going, since I didn’t really know what else to ask. I could see the sigh in his body language, and kidded him about that being the question everyone must ask him about. It’s not them it’s me… I guess I just don’t do the social thing.

So that, on top of the being one of the 25 Mormons here (18 being from our group) and not having a strong desire to go to parties and watch people get drunk… makes the social aspect kind of lame for me.

That being said, I have been having a good time with my group at various meals and just meandering around. We had a blast last night as we set up our own theater and watched Nacho Libre and laughed our heads off. So building a comrodery with the team has definitely been nice.
Hopefully I’ll post more info soon and this will break my silence. I keep wanting to post but never want my lame thought to be the first thing I say. That issue is over and now I can post freely :)

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Introducing onViewable

March 04th 2006 Posted to JavaScript/DOM

Here’s my second resuable script to hopefully find a home in the wild wild web… onViewable. Instead of duplicating all the details of the script here, please see it on it’s own page.

The jist of the script is that it’s a function that allows a snippet of code to be fired once an element is viewable on the screen.

We have a few longish type pages where I work and I wanted to use the Fade Anything Technique to do what it does best, and hilight a few elements on the page. Well a few of those elements were not viewable on the screen above the fold so I had to come up with something to make them fire when they were viewable. So long story short…I slapped together a few miscelaneous things I had laying around and onViewable was born.

Please find the details of the hows and why’s on the onViewable page. Any updates will be posted there, and I will mention them in the blog so you can be aware of them.

I look forward to any feedback.

I must give credit here (in addition to on the script’s page) to the great PPK (Peter-Paul Koch) of QuirksMode.org. Without his invaluable resource and a few functions I borrowed, this wouldn’t be here today. Thank you PPK for your great contribution to the community.

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FastrFriends Bookmarklet Version .2

January 28th 2006 Posted to Gaming, JavaScript/DOM

When playing the fun new game Fastr with a few friends it was difficult to see where they were in the rankings with it being so popular (100+ people in the game at a time). So I wanted a way to easily see where they were.

So, here’s a super quick and dirty bookmarklet for tracking friends while playing. This is like 30 mins of work and far from complete and perfect I’m sure. It’s also based on the current DOM of the page, so if that changes, this breaks. But since it’s centrally hosted I can compensate if that happens and the next time you use it after I fix it, it will work.

To use it, drag the following link to your toolbar, and then click that button after starting a game of Fastr. FastrFriends. After it’s loaded up, simply click a name to follow it, and click it again to stop following it (if you got the wrong one or whatever).

Potential upgrades I’m pondering:

  • Option to show/hide all users that aren’t your friends
  • Different colors depending on how high on the list they are
  • Track their score and then show what they got on the last guess when it changes.

I know it works in FF 1.5 and IE 6. I’ve been told it doesn’t work in Safari but I don’t have easy access to that, so if anyone can tell me what to fix I will give it a try. Otherwise I will try and get a hold of one at work on Monday.

Report any bugs here… and enjoy!

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VisitorMap plugin for ShortStat

November 07th 2005 Posted to Tech stuff, JavaScript/DOM, Code related

VisitorMapThis is just a quick plugin for ShortStat that will put your visitors on a map using the Google Maps API. I wanted to get a quick visualization of where visitors were coming from, without having to add more scripts to my site from some of the other services that have come up lately (gVisit, MapStats).

VisitorMap uses the existing information that is already saved by ShortStat. It is meant to be a plug-n-play addition that doesn’t require any database or other changes. The only required change is in the file itself to set the Google API Key (free) for the folder you are installing it in to.

This is a quick and dirty release. Some of the data parsing I am doing could probably be done cleaner, but it works for being a late night “for fun” project… at least for now.
(Read the article)

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Google Earth…. wow!!

June 28th 2005 Posted to Tech stuff, Spiffy stuff

Just got done playing with Google Earth and all I can say is “wow!”

Every time I ran into a new cool feature my jaw would drop a little farther. The fluid zoom, rotate, and angle can be played with for hours. Adding in the other features such as 3D buildings, earthquakes, etc. are even more fun. It’s got a whole section of local businesses that you can turn on to see where they are in whatever city, that hooks into the Google Local database (food, banks, schools, pharmacies, movie rentals, etc). It even has other funky things like Crime Stats, Census data, Postal Code boundries and more… although I didn’t run into any of those that worked in my local area (Utah) so that may be only available in certain places.

It is so much fun I am seriously considering upgrading to the Google Earth Plus to be able to get the cool extra features.

I know that hundreds of people will be writing about this today, but I was so impressed I just had to add my .02. Go download it and have some fun… it’s awesome!

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