Though I only spent half the day at Interactive Monday, I still managed to take in a few interesting panels and the day’s keynote with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Keynote
A lot of critcism was lobbed toward Williams and his interviewer, Umair Haque, who is the director of the Havas Media Lab at Harvard and writes a blog for the Harvard Business Review. The Wall Street Journal has a good piece wrapping up the keynote and why it was unsuccessful at capturing people’s attention.
No backchannel was needed to gauge the public’s tepid response to the event, in which Williams announced the launch of Twitter’s @anywhere function and was subsequently lobbed softball questions by interviewer Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review. (Haque, ironically, is the author of a book entitled “The Awesomeness Manifesto.”)
Williams talked about @anywhere at the start of his keynote ad after that things started to go downhill. There were a few audio problems that interrupted the start of the keynote and Haque’s questions became more like monologues where he talked about some blog post he had written or a random experience using Twitter.
Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how @anywhere develops. According to the blog post released minutes after Williams announcement, @anywhere will allow sites to embed links to Twitter profiles on their page and users can start following, tweet the link or peek their profile them without ever leaving the site.
Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning.
My Three-Year Old Is My Usability Expert
This solo panel featured Dave Stanton of the Poynter Institute, who discussed simplify web and game design in order to provide a better user experience. He gave examples of his three-year-old daughter Lucy and demonstrated how she interacted with various games. Stanton advocated the use of schema theory, which tells us that the brain structures things into categories. We, as designers, need to appeal to those categories in order to make designs more user friendly.
Hold the Cocoa: Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Jonathan Stark, who develops mobile applications for a living, gave some great tips, tools and tricks for building mobile apps using just HTML, CSS and javascript. He provided a link to his slideshow presentation on his site in addition to links to downloads to start building apps.
Basically, Stark utilizes the PhoneGap framework and jQTouch to create apps and tap into built in features like the accelerometer, GPS, vibration and sound. Definitely give this a look if you want to get around learning Objective C and dive straight into app development.
Maira Garcia 