RIApalooza - The Aftermath

Written by David Charney
Posted: June 2, 2008 (2 years, 3 months ago) | 0 comments

Well the first RIApalooza event has come and gone and I must say I enjoyed it. This two day event had good speakers, good topics, a nice mix of theory and demonstrations, good networking, and a healthy turnout of supporters. It was great to see Microsoft and Adobe (both sponsors) working together for the good of the cause. It was also nice to see all programs and platforms recognized.

Dave Meeker from Roundarch did a great job kicking off the event by discussing the core of all this RIAmadness. What, Why, Who, When - it was all covered.

Tim Heuer & Corrina Barber from Microsoft showed the ease designers and developers can look forward to using Blend. Good demonstration. I saw Blend on a lot of laptops by the end of the day.

Josh Holmes from Microsoft & Michael Labriola from Digital Primates had a great presentation on RIA. From practices to theory they covered a broad spectrum of the key components of RIA and answered that big question, “What’s the big deal?”.

Geoff Cubitt, President & CTO of Roundarch (and a Purdue man) discussed RIA while relating it to the fine work of Roundarch. He discussed different technologies (Flash, Flex, Dojo, AJAX, Silverlight) and touched a bit on selling RIA to the client.

Anthony Handley from Magenic did a great job showing designer & developer collaboration while bringing life to an application using Silverlight and XAML. He made it look so easy.

The one and only Corey Miller from Magenic (the guy who put Purdue on the map) recreated a Flash image gallery inside Silverlight and showed how to populate it with Flickr images. He did a nice job showing the many Flash designers and developers in the room that they don’t have to take that many steps back to start exploring Silverlight.

Ka Wai Cheung from We Are Mammoth discussed time saving RIA models and the power behind smart design.

So that’s a wrap. I hope this is the first of many.

CD2 - Chicago Designers & Developers User Group

Written by David Charney
Posted: May 26, 2008 (2 years, 3 months ago) | 0 comments

Hey all. I am happy to announce cd2, the new Chicago Designers & Developers User Group.

cd2 is dedicated to bridging the gap between design & development to improve the user experience and user-centered design. Function meets design in this group as we focus on creativity as it relates to design and development processes and the collaboration between the two.

If you are interested, we ask that you visit our site at www.cd2ug.org and let us know what you would like to see in the group. We will be posting more information soon detailing the group and our first meeting.

Practice What You Market

Written by David Charney
Posted: April 30, 2008 (2 years, 4 months ago) | 0 comments

I sometimes worry that many of those great words we tend to use such as usability, user experience, engage, and motivate, to name a few, are going to lose their value. I keep seeing these words being used by companies to sell their products and services and then their products and services don’t even come close to providing a usable, engaging, motivating user experience. Don’t get me wrong, it is great to see that these words are getting in the limelight. But it needs to go past the words. These values need to show themselves in the delivery as well. How do we keep these words from fizzling out? We just need to keep doing what we are doing. Keep working hard to deliver the best user experiences we can. …thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder Cats!

That is all. As always… go outside and play.