Archive for the ‘Community’ Category
March Dev/Design Mtg
If you’ve never heard of Mix, go check out the site. Then, plan on coming to the next SeattleD2iG Developer/Designer meetup to hear some first hand accounts from people who were there. I’m looking forward to hearing what the big buzz was since I don’t get a chance to go to these. Wednesday, March 25th, 7:00 – 8:30 pm.
Again, this is a casual meeting of designers and developers with the objective of fostering communication about the designer/developer relationship and emerging technologies that keep us all wired. See you there!
UPDATE: Design & Developer Meetup
2/19/09: The meeting was a lot fun. Thanks to everyone who showed up! Brent Christian’s presentation of JavaFX was very informative and drew lots of questions from the group. A lively discussion ensued about the technology’s capabilities and comparative advantages and disadvantages to design/development for iPhone, Flash/Flex and WPF/Blend.
Basics: JavaFX emphasizes continuity of usage of standard design tools (Photoshop/Illustrator) by offering a plugin that exports the code. As long as naming conventions are defined, the process looks fairly smooth. Some bugs: animation isn’t streamlined and feedback loops within the tool from dev to design are unclear. David Kelley commented that, compared to the iPhone tool, this is a much better structure. Compared to Flash and Silverlight, it seems that the next rev would be looked forward to.
NEXT MEETING: Due to conflicts with Mix, the next meeting will be pushed out to the 4th week of March. I’ll keep you posted on that.
We’ll be discussing Sun’s JavaFX technology which is a framework web 2.0 experiences inline with Flash and Silverlight user experiences. With our group’s focus being UX, we’ll be investigating how this technology will provide options for designers and developers to create a compelling UX story together, how it might relate or not to other technologies and how that ties in with developer’s requirements for system structure and optimization. With the goal of bridging ties between design and development, show up ready to probe and investigate how this technology might benefit you and your clients while developing a better understanding via the group dialogue.
Community Involvment
Went to Seattle Central this morning to hear an old connection, Chris Edwards, and his business partner/fellow grad talk about design and life after college. They’re working on their own (www.lftrt.com) after hours while both pulling down full-time jobs doing some pretty heavy-hitting design/UX work.
Chris kept harping on the importance of community involvement and how it’s proved essential to the success of their business. And what I was getting in between what he was saying was that it’s more than just showing up to meetings. It’s about being involved and developing relationships. It was a great reminder on how important people are to the whole equation.
