Hello!
The comments on this profile are unclaimed and thus are unverified.
Do they belong to you? Claim these comments.
Andrew
Is this you? Claim Profile »
3 years ago
in When is a conference not a conference? on Mathew's comments
I run a small non-conference for designers called Design Engaged. We've also dispensed with the audience/speaker division, but have found that imposing certain other structures really does make the event run smoothly, and forces everyone to participate in ways they feel comfortable. You can look at the event blog at www.designenaged.com. I've written about the conference structure in 2005 here and about the 2004 version here.
I think it's great that people want to disrupt the boring conference form, but that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Structured presentations, typically prepareed in advance, give people time to plan and craft a presentation of ideas. Leaving room for discussion and real interaction between audience and speaker is the trick. Design Engaged also builds in lots of other *sizes* of group interaction: we spend about a day in small groups of 6 or so, outside the conference space, and then spend some time in those groups doing actual work. Leave lots of time for lunches dinners and breaks, and everyone who wants to can find time to meet and talk to everyone.
I think it's great that people want to disrupt the boring conference form, but that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Structured presentations, typically prepareed in advance, give people time to plan and craft a presentation of ideas. Leaving room for discussion and real interaction between audience and speaker is the trick. Design Engaged also builds in lots of other *sizes* of group interaction: we spend about a day in small groups of 6 or so, outside the conference space, and then spend some time in those groups doing actual work. Leave lots of time for lunches dinners and breaks, and everyone who wants to can find time to meet and talk to everyone.
3 years ago
in I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360 on Scobleizer
I'll echo most of "Louis"'s comments above. I work with ASP.NET at work and Rails at home.
ASP.NET even in 2.0 retains an attitude which is, at its core, anti-web. It seems as if its designed and built for people who not only don't care passionately about web standards and browser compatibility, but by and for people who ACTIVELY DISLIKE THE WEB.
The simple fact that ASP.NET cannot produce simple, readable, styleable valid XHTML is just plain ignorance. ASP.NET seems to go out of its way to shield me from the very things I want by-hand control over, and to provide me with endless stupid options that are not useful to me. Fuck man, ASP.NET takes over all the #id attributes of my HTML elements! That's bullshit, just bullshit.
Rails treats XHTML as a first-class delivery vehicle, assumes I want model validation and user-friendly errors from the get go. It assumes I will design and develop my application in layers that correspond to the principles unobtrusiveness: the CSS layer will not be baked into the HTML; the Javascript will not minimally autogenerated from my framework.
Plus, yes, Ruby is a deeply beautiful language. Rails extends that beauty to the web framework world. The OS X text editor TextMate is something approaching a work of art. Why would I want to spend my work time in a tool environment I felt any less deeply about?
ASP.NET even in 2.0 retains an attitude which is, at its core, anti-web. It seems as if its designed and built for people who not only don't care passionately about web standards and browser compatibility, but by and for people who ACTIVELY DISLIKE THE WEB.
The simple fact that ASP.NET cannot produce simple, readable, styleable valid XHTML is just plain ignorance. ASP.NET seems to go out of its way to shield me from the very things I want by-hand control over, and to provide me with endless stupid options that are not useful to me. Fuck man, ASP.NET takes over all the #id attributes of my HTML elements! That's bullshit, just bullshit.
Rails treats XHTML as a first-class delivery vehicle, assumes I want model validation and user-friendly errors from the get go. It assumes I will design and develop my application in layers that correspond to the principles unobtrusiveness: the CSS layer will not be baked into the HTML; the Javascript will not minimally autogenerated from my framework.
Plus, yes, Ruby is a deeply beautiful language. Rails extends that beauty to the web framework world. The OS X text editor TextMate is something approaching a work of art. Why would I want to spend my work time in a tool environment I felt any less deeply about?
3 years ago
in Ross doesn’t trust Microsoft’s approach to Web on Scobleizer
Wow, what a list. For me, it's MSFT's tools' attitude toward HTML. ASP.NET treats HTML as if it's a burden, an embarassment. It's very hard to get good valid, predictable HTML out of it.
it's frankly an attitude of disrespect for the way that web development has gone in the last three or four years. HEre are some suggestions:
- Stop bothering with demo-only featrures like "draging and dropping" controls to build a page, which then of course uses fucking pixel-based positioning, destroying my page layout. You know how often it's useful to be able to drag a checkbox control (a frigging *control*! For a single HTML tag!) onto a page, rather than writing it? Never ever ever. That how often.
- Everyone buidling web apps that I know wants to render clean, validating HTML, or as close as reasonably possible. Stop treating HTML as merely an output format, to be slapped together as you see fit.
- Everyone buidling web apps in 2005 wants to style the page almost entirely through CSS. That professional MSFT tools automatically insert spacer gifs is an embarassment. Table-row background colors in tr-tags is an insult. Support for older browsers should no longer be a default, it should be an option.
- Everyone buidling web apps wants to do more with DOM manipulation than ever: Ajax, page effects, etc. Existing libraries (like Prototype) do this cross-browser, and are nicely designed. MSFT's "Atlas" feels like some thick-client geek was assigned by a middle-manager to reinvent the whole damn paradigm cause it wasn't "flexible enough."
it's frankly an attitude of disrespect for the way that web development has gone in the last three or four years. HEre are some suggestions:
- Stop bothering with demo-only featrures like "draging and dropping" controls to build a page, which then of course uses fucking pixel-based positioning, destroying my page layout. You know how often it's useful to be able to drag a checkbox control (a frigging *control*! For a single HTML tag!) onto a page, rather than writing it? Never ever ever. That how often.
- Everyone buidling web apps that I know wants to render clean, validating HTML, or as close as reasonably possible. Stop treating HTML as merely an output format, to be slapped together as you see fit.
- Everyone buidling web apps in 2005 wants to style the page almost entirely through CSS. That professional MSFT tools automatically insert spacer gifs is an embarassment. Table-row background colors in tr-tags is an insult. Support for older browsers should no longer be a default, it should be an option.
- Everyone buidling web apps wants to do more with DOM manipulation than ever: Ajax, page effects, etc. Existing libraries (like Prototype) do this cross-browser, and are nicely designed. MSFT's "Atlas" feels like some thick-client geek was assigned by a middle-manager to reinvent the whole damn paradigm cause it wasn't "flexible enough."
