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Last Friday, AbilityNet organized an accessibility conference entitled Accessibility 2.0 - A million flowers bloom in the City University in London, England.
The conference took place in the City University's Oliver Thompson lecture hall and had about 175 attendees waiting for the presentations and Q&A sessions.
The day started with Robin Christopherson - the host - explaining the housekeeping and health and safety setup (with Kath Moonan pointing out the nearest exits flight attendant style) and introducing the line-up of the day.
First up in terms of speakers was the keynote by Jeremy Keith, who didn't have any presentation but gave a "prepared speech", available on his blog covering the history of data portability and arguing that good data preservation also means accessibility.
After the coffee break Steve Faulkner of the Paciello Group explained about the accessibility problems of Ajax showing twitter as an example and what would need to be done to it to make it work with assistive technologies. Steve is one of the bloggers of the Paciello Group blog with great information about assistive technology and how to support it.
I was up next with my talk on how to do accessibility wrong. For years I've been consulting companies in terms of accessibility and my experiences are summarized in this talk. I wanted to write this for a long time and I am happy that I finally found a conference that went for it. The slides are available on slideshare:
The presentation covers all the things we do to seemingly support accessibility but really just makes us feel good. It also covers ways to sell accessibility to business stake holders taking their ideas and needs into consideration. We will hopefully be able to have it as a video soon.
After lunch Antonia Hyde from United Response talked about a disability need that is not covered that often when it comes to web accessibility: learning disability. The United Response site has some very good stories about users with learning disabilities and her presentation covered some of the basic things you need to be aware of:
Like my presentation, Antonia made sure that the audience understands that supporting the needs for people with learning disabilities will make for better products for all users.
Jonathan Hassel, head of Audience Experience and Usability at the BBC talked about user generated content and the issues with it. Right now there is a problem that not enough user generated content has text alternatives and descriptions but at the same time the tendency to use online video more and more makes it easier for people with learning disabilities to consume and people that only know sign language to participate in social networks. Jonathan also showed some games the BBC has developed for children with disabilities that explain for example science with sound instead of imagery and lots of text. The really nice part of those are that they come with an interface and parents can play together with their children, one using the graphical interface and the other getting the audio feedback. Other games showed how you can do an English to sign language translator in a game fashion.
Next up was Stephen Eisden of Precedent Communications talking about "Building a social network for disabled users" and the user testing, accessibility audits and technology decisions that come with it. The network they produced based on WordPress is currently in a pilot stage and will become available at http://www.dip-online.org/.
After yet another coffee break Ian Forrester of BBC backstage talked about "Tools and Technologies to watch and avoid" when it comes to accessibility. He talked about how Web2.0 is all about participation and how we should make it possible for anyone to add information. He also pointed out problems with certain technologies like Flash and what should be done to make them more accessible.
The day concluded with a panel discussion on Accessibility 2.0 moderated by Julie Howell with the panel members Mike Davies of Yahoo! UK, Kath Moonan from AbilityNet, Bim Egan from the RNIB, Jonathan Hassell from the BBC, Antonia Hyde from United Response and Panayiotis Zaphiris from the city university.
All in all the conference was a great success and initial feedback from attendees was that they learnt a lot to take back home with them. The main consensus seems to be that accessibility is not about following guidelines but about testing with real users. Furthermore it seems to be time to not think about content guidelines but instead make a change in where the content comes from: the authoring tools.
You can find out more information about the conference at the AbilityNet web site and they promised to release the podcasts and videos over the next few weeks. Jeremy Keith also live-blogged the conference, giving his feedback directly in-line.
Update: Jim O'Donnell also did some live-blogging.
Posted by cheil at 4:54 AM | Comments (4)
I wanted to draw your attention to an organization that I and Yahoo! have been supporting that you might want to support, too -- NetSquared. The goal of NetSquared is simple: to help hundreds of thousands of non-profit organizations (NPOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) successfully utilize the empowering capabilities of the Internet to increase their impact and achieve social change.
The NetSquared Mashup Challenge: Hacking for Social Change
For the first time, NetSquared is running a really cool program called the Mashup Challenge in which they are matching up ideas from non-profits and NGOs involved in all sorts of social change to people like you (i.e. developers, product managers, and designers) who have the skills to implement them. I have been helping NetSquared promote the Mashup Challenge (see their recent YDN Theater video) because I think it's a very practical roll-up-your-sleeves way of getting people to work together across many boundaries (company, international, etc) to produce something exciting and useful that benefits the world at large. It's very much in the spirit of our own Yahoo! Hack Day.
The Projects
The community around NetSquared has already submitted dozens of ideas for theMashup Challenge and the NetSquared community voted for the top 20, which are listed here (there are 21 since there was a tie!). You can see ALL of the ideas here.
How to Participate
I'm working with Billy Bicket, NetSquared's organizer, to recruit Project Leads interested in participating in a 4-week sprint leading up to NetSquared's conference, happening on May 27-28 at Cisco in San Jose, CA.
By contributing to NetSquared in the capacity of Project Lead, participants will be working with a leading social innovator working on a range of challenges including:
1. refining some of their ideas about how the data they are using could be rendered in mashups; and
2. in some cases, building mashups using a variety of APIs, products, or coming up with creative technical solutions to particular problems they are facing.
Project Leads will receive access to all NetSquared Hack Days. The next invite-only event is happening on May 4 at Moscone Center in San Francisco and is hosted by Sun and NetSquared. Project leads will also receive two free tickets to this year's NetSquared Conference.
Here is a quick run-down of the role and expectations for Project Leads and here are the simple next steps if you would like to participate:
1. Scroll through the list of 21 Featured Projects
2. Send Billy Bicket (billybicket -at- yahoo.com) an email with your favorite three (3) featured projects, and confirm your interest in participating by Wednesday, April 30 at noon.
4. Once you send Billy an email, he'll send easy next steps (including link to conference registration) and details about engaging with featured projects for expedient approach and execution.
Bringing It Together: The NetSquared Conference
The Mashup Challenge will culminate in the annual NetSquared Conference on May 27-28 in San Jose. At the conference, project teams will have an opportunity to display and discuss their mashups and attendees will vote to select the top three (this is only several weeks away and some of the ideas are complex, so the projects don't have to be 100% done, just underway). All 20 projects at the conference will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money. The share will be determined by voting at the conference.
It's a good cause, a great opportunity to meet new people, and an even better opportunity to use your various web superpowers. Join a project today!
Chad Dickerson
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 7:48 AM | Comments (1)
We’re blowin’ the doors wide open!
Today we’re introducing the Yahoo! Open Strategy (or Y!OS for short), the details behind Yahoo!’s big bet to "deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers."
Y!OS platforms will harness Yahoo!'s unique strengths – our rich and relevant user experiences (we’re #1 in 7 verticals), our massive audience (half a billion users/month), and our deep data repositories (content, content, content) – and open them to the innovations of the developer community. Our aim: to fundamentally transform how people experience Yahoo!.
With Y!OS, we’re moving from a model in which each Yahoo! property develops much of its own technology to one where we share common data and frameworks that can be easily surfaced across multiple Yahoo! properties and off the Yahoo.com network.
It’s a major rewiring of Yahoo!.
And the good news for developers is that Y!OS will allow you to access to these assets, build applications around them, and then get distribution on Yahoo!’s monumentally popular properties (and/or use them in your own websites).
Specifically, Y!OS includes:
A Single Social Platform for Yahoo!
The Social Platform will enable a single social "connective tissue" across all Yahoo! experiences letting users view Yahoo! through a relevant social lens. The Social Platform isn’t yet another social networking vertical from Yahoo!. It's a common social infrastructure that will span all of Yahoo! and the web beyond. We’ll start by collapsing the Y! 360 and Mash connection lists into one social repository (and add a new user interface to it), then we'll take a proactive approach to tapping into the TEN BILLION aggregate relationships in Mail, Messenger, Address Book, and other social areas of Yahoo! to recommend connections to our users. Plus, we’ll begin surfacing users’ profile and connection information throughout Yahoo! as the whole Yahoo! network becomes more social, which will motivate users to activate connections. Developers will gain access to this Social Platform via RESTful APIs, giving you ways to query for a user's profile data and connections data (our Social API), ways to update a user’s presence across the network (Presence API), and an activity stream with an API for reading/writing a user’s activity (we call this “Updates”).
Lotsa Standardized Web Services
You want data? Have we got data for you! And we’ll be delivering a lot more of it in the coming months. We’re working to get it to you in ways that won’t require "RTFM" every time we release new APIs. We’ve created a RESTful API standard to which most new Yahoo! API releases will adhere, including all of the Social Platform APIs mentioned above. And some more news: we’ll be supporting OAuth – look for the OAuth Consumer Key to replace the YDN App ID for new API signups here on the developer website very soon.
The Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP)
So now you have an out-of-the-box social graph, and wicked cool data to mashup. How about some traffic? How about some traffic from Yahoo! Mail, the Yahoo! Front Page, Yahoo! Search, My Yahoo! and the revamped Y! Profile? The Yahoo! Application Platform will allow developers to build applications that plug directly into these Yahoo! pages and properties, starting today with an exciting developer's preview release into Yahoo! Search called Search Monkey.
As Yahoo! is a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, YAP supports OpenSocial. Apps you’ve written for other OpenSocial-compliant application platforms should function on Yahoo! with minimal tweaking (and vice versa) -- or you can write apps that go directly to the Social Platform REST APIs; it’s up to you. And YAP offers you the choice of hosting your app with Yahoo! or using your own server to proxy your app back to us.
Today’s announcement is just a hint of things to come. Get started today with Search Monkey and stay tuned for a cascade of more announcements as pieces continue to come online.
We couldn’t be more excited to work with you to change Yahoo! and change the web.
Say it with me now: “Developers! Developers! Developers!” ;)
Cody Simms
Y!OS Product Management
Posted by havi at 7:26 AM | Comments (9)
In February, we began talking about our plans to open up Yahoo! Search to website owners and all third-party developers. This new developer platform, which we’re calling SearchMonkey, uses data web standards and structured data to enhance the functionality, appearance, and usefulness of search results.
With SearchMonkey:
As Ari Balogh, Yahoo!’s CTO, will mention in his Web 2.0 Expo keynote this morning, we’re rolling out a limited preview of the SearchMonkey developer tool starting today. With this online tool, developers can build data services that can be used to present richer, more useful search results. These data services can be constructed using structured data either from the Yahoo! Search index or from publicly available sources (such as APIs).
In addition to signing up for the preview, head over to the Yahoo! Developer Network booth at Web 2.0 Expo to check out a demo.
And what’s a new product without a party to kick it off? We’re celebrating this component of our open platform with a Developer Event at our Sunnyvale campus on Thursday, May 15. If you’re interested in joining us, here’s more information. Hope to see you there!
Amit Kumar
Chief SearchMonkey
[This post originally featured on the Yahoo! Search blog]
Posted by havi at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)
Committed to keeping up with the latest in Firefox and Firebug development, we’re happy to announce that a new version increment of YSlow was released, mainly aiming at addressing compatibility. What’s in this release?
Looking at the diversity of Firefox/Firebug versions, these are the current available branches for Firefox and Firebug.
Firefox has two active branches:
Firebug has 3 active branches:
Firebug 1 doesn’t work with Firefox 3, so there are a total of 5 combinations and the YSlow 0.9.5b1 has been successfully tested on all of them:
| Firebug 1 | Firebug 1.1 | Firebug 1.2 | |
| Firefox 2 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Firefox 3 | N/A | Yes | Yes |
You can download the tool here, report bugs here, read the performance rules, and participate in the performance mailing list discussions. Also make sure you keep an eye on our performance-related postings on YDN and YUI Blog.
Enjoy,
Yahoo! Exceptional Performance
Posted by tenni at 10:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Just in time for the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a team of developers - Leonard Lin, Steve Marshall, and Kellan Elliott-McCrea - have released Fireball, a location-sharing mashup built on Fire Eagle, Twitter, and Upcoming.
It doesn't require you to join and populate "yet another" social network app, since it builds on existing services, using Twitter as an interface and to bring your social graph to bear, Fire Eagle for secure sharing of your location, and Upcoming for cross-correlating events and locations.
Says Kellan, a Flickr application engineer "building technology solutions for social problems":
What I love about Fire Eagle is that we aren't asking people to change their behavior (much), just helping people make sense of the information deluge. Answering the eternal "It's 3am, do you know where your friends are?" questions. I think it's pretty amazing that we have the "small pieces loosely joined" to build a tool like Fireball, that lives in existing tools, and uses APIs, and Jabber to tie it all together.
Fireball developer Leonard Lin agrees:
We didn't want to write a brand new "app," per se. We wanted to add some features onto things you already use. I just want Twitter with location. It doesn't make sense to have to rewrite Twitter to get one new feature.
Christian Crumlish
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted by cheil at 4:45 PM | Comments (1)
Over at the official blog of the Yahoo! User Interface Library we have a guest post by Caridy Patiño, developer of the YUI-based Bubbling Library talking about decoupling.
In essence, this technique allows you to create large JavaScript-based web applications that have independent modules that communicate with another independent of the availability of the other module. This is a small improvement to the Custom Event model used in the YUI as it makes your apps less dependent on performance and execution order.
Read more about Decoupling with the YUI on the YUI blog.
Posted by cheil at 2:39 PM | Comments (0)
Last weekend James Broad went to Ankara, Turkey to present Yahoo! APIs at METU University to an audience of computer science undergraduates.
The aim of the presentation was to introduce some of the tools and services Yahoo! provides to developers, and raise exposure of the YDN in Turkey.
Here's what he had to say about the trip and event.
Prior to the event, I took some time in considering the audience and how what works in western Europe may not have the same appeal in eastern Europe. I narrowed down the API selection we would promote down to:
As a developer I understand that in order to experiment with new technologies, there is an incentive factor to get hacking. I am more inclined to trial if someone can easily introduce me to their product/service. With this in mind, my focus was to have a example driven presentation to show how easy it is to use our service and to help prevent frustration by showing the way in rather than sticking to what can be done with our services.
Promising start
Sitting in the presentation/advertisement prior to ours, I glanced around the lecture theatre to see a plethora of empty seats. Did they all get bored of spending their precious day of rest, listening to talks and just drift off home? To make matters worse, people were slowly leaving as I was scanning the room. Not a good sign.
After the break it was our turn and our initial fears of a poor turn-out were quickly forgotten. The theatre started packing out with what seemed to be a very keen audience.
By the time the two very professional student event hosts introduced me to present I found it hard to spot an empty seat, nor an uninterested face. Yahoo! was obviously a company these students were keen to learn more about.
How did the presentation go down?
I didn't feel much like giving a presentation but instead I was interested in interacting with the developers in an open forum. In retrospect this was a good idea. As soon as I invited the audience to ask grilling questions there was no hesitation whatsoever. At any free moment, consistently, a handful of arms shot up, some so eager to fire their question, they could not wait for the microphone to reach them - they just shouted out instead.
A few common themes seemed to emerge from the questions, mostly related to improvements that could be made to existing Yahoo! products and general questions on our media platforms (e.g. Flickr™). I answered these questions as honestly and as un-biased as possible, as I wouldn't expect anything less from other speakers. When it came to feature requestsI tended to go for "If it is not currently in our systems now, it is likely to be on their roadmap, but if you have any suggestions, feel free to send your feedback to the relevant product". I also offered to forward some of the suggestions myself.
One question that stood out to me especially was, "What is it like to work at Yahoo!?", to which I asked back if they wanted to the off-the-record version or not. Of course, they did want it and I answered (in a nutshell), that Yahoo! is a great company to work for, and that I personally don't imagine working for a better company.
Great audience
Considering we had an all Turkish crowd, they were especially patient with interpreting my (perceived) speedy Londoner talking style, and seemed to understand everything I was saying, based on the questions and feedback.
I felt very welcome, prior, during and after our presentations, something I attribute to the very hospitable nature of the Turkish, the quality of the students at the university and a genuine respect for Yahoo! I had a great time presenting, socialising and visiting the university and Ankara itself, and would be more than happy to return.
Awards
Part of the event at Ankara METU University was based on student hack submissions with the brief simply to use Yahoo! APIs to their best ability. A short time before the event we judged the submissions based on their usefulness, ability and execution. We then shortlisted the entries to fit in with a first, second and third prize. The prize would consist of a cash reward and a certificate for their hack.
The closing presentation at METU was presenting awards and I presented the following students with awards for their hacks:
James Broad
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted by cheil at 10:45 AM | Comments (2)
Coming back from Adobe's onAir conference and seeing some of the challenges we are facing in terms of security of third party JavaScript I am realizing more and more that really cool things are happening around the world's most misunderstood programming language (according to Douglas Crockford).
Time to take a quick look at how the use of the language changed over the years. This is by no account a historically perfect representation (feel free to add comments to rectify mistakes and add milestones) but my personal experience.
When I started with JavaScript everything was about the browser object model (BOM). The DOM recommendation was not quite finished yet and the lack of browser support stopped it from being a standard (to me the implementation and general market support makes something a standard, not that a group defines it as one).
When you were talking JavaScript, you talked about document.write() to produce content, forking code to be supported by browsers with document.all and document.layers, scripting of frames and interaction and opening of different browser windows with the window.open() method.
In order to access the content of the current document (or the one in a popup window, a frame or, in the case of Netscape, in a layer you had document.images, document.links and last but not least document.forms with its elements collection. You used the name attributes to access different elements like forms.myform.surname.value and other abominations.
That said, JavaScript was already reaching further. One of the first things I did with it outside the browser was 1999. I helped other developers in my company (etoys back then, RIP) to work faster and not having to do the same work over and over again by customizing the company-approved editor: Allaire Homesite 4.0. Homesite had an Application object that allowed you to access parts of the application itself, the document you are currently working on and all the others that are open. This allowed you to write quite powerful Macros in an easy manner using JavaScript. You also had access to the file system via the internal user dialogs.
In the browser world you also had bespoke implementations of JavaScript - first and foremost Microsoft's JScript to script Internet Explorer and access its chrome and other parts that weren't available to other browsers. If you renamed your HTML document from example.html to example.hta you even had a "HTML Application" which worked outside the browser's security model and gave you access to the file system to read out folders and file names.
Across the browsers, the DOM got support starting with patchy implementations in IE5 and Opera and finally getting full-on support and developer tutorials in Netscape 6 based on Gecko as the rendering engine and Spidermonkey as the scripting engine. This lead to Phoenix, then to Firebird and finally to Firefox as we know it now.
In order to flag up a change in the JavaScript development world, "DOM Scripting" got coined as a term for writing "modern" JavaScript. Instead of relying on custom browser implementations our scripts started using the W3C standard DOM to access the document and gave us full access to anything that is inside HTML tags. You can read out the hierarchy of the document, traverse the element tree and access, alter or even create elements as and when you need them.
This power made a lot of the cumbersome browser hacks and workarounds obsolete and allowed us to write cleaner scripts. And just in time as malware exploits and annoying advertising practices and the software counter-strike (PopUp blockers) made it less and less of a good plan to rely on multiple windows or frames. DOM scripting allowed us to create much slicker interfaces in a clean manner.
Then things got really wild when Ajax got its name. The use of XMLhttpRequest to create asynchronous calls was nothing new, but giving it a name and a methodology to follow worked out swimmingly.
Technically this was right up the alley of DOM scripting as the returned data in Ajax is XML, and you need the DOM or XSLT to convert this into data that can be displayed by a browser inside a HTML document. However, as we sent more and more complex information via Ajax, developers got bored of the cumbersome conversion and started to use responseText with the non-standard innerHTML to output data instead. This was so powerful and easy that innerHTML actually became part of the W3C recommendations.
This is where we are now, we use JavaScript a lot for all kind of Ajax applications that simulate rich client interfaces with CSS, JavaScript and HTML. And of course this leads to problems:
* We break the normal use of browsers and have to fix things like browser history and bookmarking with hacks
* We run into more and more security problems, as every JavaScript on the page is running with the same authority and we do send user data over an easy to intercept channel.
The first issue is quite known and we have to resort to hacks like fragment identifier updating and hidden iframes to seed the browser history (libraries make that easy for you, for example the Yahoo User Interface Browser History Manager).
If you look at it from a very pragmatic point of view though than it is a problem of the browser and shouldn't need our input. Ajax applications are a de-facto standard way of working and browsers should provide you with a technology hook to create them and keep a consistent application state.
This is happening right now, as both IE8 and the HTML 5 working drafts talk about a hashchange event that would allow you to seed the browser history, thus making bookmarking and the back button work without resorting to an iframe.
The security issues are a much bigger problem, especially when we think realistically and consider that we will build more and more modules for application frameworks and networks (like Facebook) than page/site based products in the future. There is not much you can do to sandbox JavaScript as even embedding in an iframe allows the script to modify the top.location property and redirect the current page to other sites without the user's consent.
One approach is to write a pre-processor or converter that checks JavaScript for sanity and filters out potentially dangerous code. One of those is Caja.
The other option is to only allow a sub-set of JavaScript in third party code we implement in our systems. This is the approach of AdSafe and is much less overhead but also could mean limiting third party solutions.
If we take off our blinkers and look around the whole developer world we find that there is a group of developers that have been writing JavaScript for a long time, came up with good best practices and very impressive code without ever touching a browser: Flash developers.
As ActionScript is executed within the Flash environment none of the browser quirks and problems appear (except for the back button and browser history and the solution is the same). This lead to quite an impressive group of developers that have a very pragmatic view of JavaScript. With Adobe now offering AIR as an application framework that allows you to write HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications in an installable manner we should start mixing the world of Flash development where everything just clicks (ok, not really, but much more than outside it) and the vast knowledge of how browsers fail and what security issues to avoid when writing JavaScript. What this will give us is truly portable applications and code and idea re-use the like we never imagined possible.
Other products that try to help us patch the browser are for example Google gears, which allow you for example to have a local data storage and keep the interface of web applications very responsive even when there is a lot of calculation going on. The way Gears does that is by allowing multiple JavaScript threads that only do the heavy computation lifting whilst the main browser thread can go on keeping the interface in check.
JavaScript is here to stay, it is easy to learn and provides instant satisfaction when trying it out. Browsers as we know them now will change drastically and maybe make way for more clever applications and frameworks that allow us to use the same technologies and knowledge without the pain and uncertainty. The skillset of JavaScript is a great one to have right now and we can only make it better by keeping an open mind to new ideas rather than dwelling on knowledge gained painfully in the past.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted by cheil at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)
Initially 13, then 14, and now 34 performance best practices have been released. As promised, we've updated our pages to include details on each of these new rules. The rules will gradually find their way into YSlow, at least those that are testable. Huge thanks goes out to all those at Yahoo! who helped identify, validate and test the new best practices, and especially to our very own Stoyan Stefanov who put it all together. Stoyan Stefanov is part of the Exceptional Performance team and also the lead developer for YSlow.
We hope you'll find some interesting ideas to help you accelerate the user experience on your pages today. Any comments and feedback appreciated. Let's make the web a better place!
Tenni Theurer
Yahoo! Exceptional Performance
Posted by tenni at 4:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
A bunch of Yahoos attended the Evans Data developer relations conference over the last couple of days.
Our very own Jeremy Zawodny talked about "Appealing to Laziness and Impatience" -
"Larry Wall, the father of the Perl scripting language, has often said that the three virtues of a good programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. In this talk, we'll look at how some of Yahoo's offerings have been successful without any sort of monetization plan. They're freely available, easy to use, and incredibly useful. In other words, they're great for the lazy and impatient."
Attendees also heard about the ways various companies are nurturing their developer communities. There seems to be a whole range of types of program out there, from the well-funded corporate marketing machines to skunk-works efforts just getting off the ground.
On the morning of the second day, we saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu checking into the hotel. Sadly he wasn't there to hear Jeremy, but to participate in the Global Philanthropy forum which was kicking off as our conference finished.
Sophie Major
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by smajor at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)
Several folks from Yahoo!’s user experience design (UED) organization are heading out to Miami to present at the 9th annual IA Summit, April 10-14, 2008. IA, which stands for Information Architecture, is the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability. (Definition from the IA Institute.)
This year’s talks are programmed around the theme "Experiencing Information." I'm interested to see how the scheduled content of the summit has fleshed out from the original proposals I read many months ago as a conference reviewer.
Three designers from YDN --Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone (me), Lucas Pettinati--will teach a pre-conference workshop on Thursday April 10.
Design patterns: from interaction to design to build
In this workshop we'll teach attendees how to identify and write interaction design patterns, build and curate a design pattern library, and map patterns to a code library. Finally, we will show how to create rapid prototypes with the combination of patterns and code libraries. Our reference material consists of the design pattern library and the Yahoo! User Interface Library, found here on the YDN website.
As part of the workshop, attendees get alpha access to a suite of design components created for use in tools like OmniGraffle, Adobe Illustrator, and Visio. We built these components to enable rapid creation of wireframes and designs that map to available code in the YUI library. These assets will launch on YDN as part of the Pattern Library later this month. (Stay tuned!)
The summit is a great place to learn about information design, interaction design and information architecture. And Yahoo! is well represented.
Other Yahoo presenters at the conference:
All the summit sessions are being recorded for podcasts by Boxes and Arrows. Slides for most sessions will be available via SlideShare. This is a nice-sized conference ( compared to the crowds of SXSW)--topping out last year at 560 attendees. There's plenty of space and opportunity to network, mingle, learn, and catch up with old friends.
If you are attending, look us up.
If you are interested in attending you can still register here: http://www.iasummit.org/2008/
See you in Miami -
Erin Malone
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by havi at 10:17 PM | Comments (1)
Last Friday and Saturday I went to the Over The Air conference which was a lot of fun. When a hack event or conference focuses on a narrow section of technology it can really be a sign of how vibrant a community is. With over 250 participants Over the Air showed that the London mobile scene is really happening right now.
It seems like we are starting to set a trend. Whenever we bring Fire Eagle to a hack event the fire alarms go off. Talk about a hot product! Like London Hack Day, Over the Air had to be evacuated for a while. Happily it was a nice day and everyone chilled out on the lawn to chat about ideas.
On Friday night Yahoo threw a little bash to celebrate the hacking going on, with lots of hackers staying overnight there was plenty of activity. The DJ cut a pretty tune late into the night while the hacking started upstairs.
There were more talks on Saturday including Steve Marshall talking about Fire Eagle. Steve wrote the Fire Eagle Python API wrapper and was well versed to give the attendees an understanding of what Fire Eagle is about and how to use it. Steve is going to be at the Fire Eagle developer evening in London later this month.
Ricardo Varela presented the latest Yahoo! Go open platform. His tutorial on our Blueprint language and how to use the
And finally, the hacks. At the end of the conference the hackers were asked to present what they had worked on. The imagination and creativity was plain. There were hardware hacks from a bluetooth, accelerometer controlled robot (called 'Octobastard' for the 8+ computers strung together to control it) to a virtual sword fighting game requiring you to wave your phone around like a loony.
There were also software hacks a plenty with Twittering from your windows mobile, a 21st century version of the fridge door accepting post it notes over SMS and browser sync to load whatever web site you are reading on your computer to your phone and vice versa and many more winners. Not to forget my personal favourite for a pedestrian city like London, location based capture the flag game using Fire Eagle. It's probably good for me to get away from the computer every now and again for a little exercise.
A big thanks to the BBC and University College London for hosting such a great event in an technology area which isn't always in the limelight. And thanks to all the other sponsors who made it such a great event. Thanks to Alex Lee and Daniel Appelquist for the photos used in the post.
Tom Hughes-Croucher
Y! Developer Network
Posted by croucher at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)
The last weekend the Social Innovation Camp in London, England had several development teams battling for support for their projects, all of which trying to solve a real life social problem with web technologies. At the end two of these projects won some start capital but everyone involved got a lot of experience crossing boundaries of IT and social working.
Unlike other unconferences and hack days the Social Innovation camp expected more than just a technical showcase of the participating teams. The criteria the different entries were judged by were their social need, the technical implementation, the PR ideas, their sustainability and what next steps the teams had planned.
The rationale of the organizers was that there is an immediate social problem to be solved which meant that the products started or accelerated at the camp have to come to fruition afterwards. Of the 70 submitted projects the team of judges chose six that had the highest potential to be delivered to a sensible stage over the course of a weekend.
The first thing that struck me when I arrived on the scene on Sunday was that the idea of creating teams for "hacks" was absolutely brilliant. The place was covered in whiteboards with brainstorming tracks, storyboards and paper prototypes and you saw that each team had done a great job distributing the business, technical and creative tasks of the respective product to experts in the team. The outcome of this two day "war room"-like approach to project development was impressive to say the least.
The projects in detail:
On the Up (formerly known as personal development reports) is a web project that allows young people to start a plan for themselves to become more than they are now. For example they would want to become a world class footballer. The system then allows the young person to keep track of all the steps on the way and to give feedback as to how it went. The system would create graphs of all the participants of these self-improvement projects that would allow a mentor or a council sponsor to see the results of their work in a measurable format.
StuffShare is a web product and social network that allows you to lend stuff to and from other people. During the presentation the team showed that the average use time of a drill is 20 minutes, yet everybody buys their own instead of asking their neighbour to borrow one. This is what StuffShare wants to change. By enabling people to search or offer things to borrow, have a rating system for each user (ebay style but less bloated) and building on existing social networks, it will make sure less products are bought without a real need for them and people talk more to each other.
Rate your Prison (formerly known as prison visits) is a review site and information network about prisons in the UK. The team showed in video interviews with partners of inmates and prison workers that there is a need for making it easier for outside family members to visit people in jail and get a platform to talk about their experiences. The main example was a lady who had to wait three weeks before being able to see her brother in jail for the first time. The system is based loosely on a similar and very successful system in the UK that allows patients to rate their hospital stay.
Enabled by Design is a review site and social network that revolves around "living aids" - bespoke furniture and daily utensils that are accessible for people with disabilities and make their live easier. The main message of the product will be that these aids should be useful and pretty - nobody with a disability should be forced to live in an environment that looks like a cheap hospital. The idea is to allow for design showcases, ask for solutions for different use cases ("how can I cut vegetables when I infrequently get spasm in my hand") and allow people to design their solution and try to find a company that'll implement it.
Wibi.it (formerly known as Barcode Wikipedia) is a system that allows you to take a photo of a barcode of any product (or type the barcode in) and shows you a wiki entry for the product. The main goal was to allow people to get information about a product while they are in the supermarket as to how "green" the product really is or how much it should go for. Easily the geekiest entry it was quite interesting to see how you can try to bridge real live tactile experiences (like shopping) and "crowdsourced" information on the web. Even if you have to cheat "slightly" to make the technology work out :-).
CV LifeLine (formerly known as rate my CV) is a web application that allows you to create an online CV by entering experiences and certifications on a timeline interface. You can create different CVs according to who you'd like to send it to and can get mentoring and professional review and advice. It is a bit like LinkedIn, but with a much more agile and easier interface. The social aspect is that it is targeted to people that move to the UK and have a high qualification in their originating country. Most of these will not get the same jobs but much lesser valuable jobs because they didn't sell themselves the right way on their CVs.
Glue (working name) was a "rebel project" that emerged on the weekend as a collaboration of several people who didn't find a spot in the other teams. The idea of this web application is to make it easy for family members to take care of their elderly parents, even when they are geographically scattered around the country or even the globe. The idea is to keep up a "dad page" or "mom page" with all the contacts in their area you can call up in case of emergencies, keep track of their medical history and prescriptions and find people with parents in the same area to exchange experiences.
All in all there was an amazing amount of great work done on the weekend, and I am sure that all of the projects will go their merry way towards going live and changing the social life of a lot of people. The judges' decision on who the first and second winners were (who both got some starting capital to get them going further) wasn't easy but surprisingly unison: The first price went to "Enabled by Design" and the second to "Rate my Prison".
The organizers will follow up on the success and progression of the different projects and we will follow up with some more in-depth coverage at a later stage.
I am particularly pleased to see that the Social Innovation Camp managed to cross boundaries in the developer world. It is easy to get geeks coding (just give me a task and my mac), but it is hard to make them find solutions to problems other than those that only exist in their world. By taking real-life issues to solve the geek energy was used for good and exposed people who have to deal with human problems to the principles that drive the social web. In other words, our little world of geekiness with all its drive and ideals was opened to those who really need some positive vibes in their work arena.
I was very happy to have been part of this as a judge as the Social Innovation camp showed how the energy of the mashup and social web movement can work wonders. I am sure that some of the developers on the day got a bit de-geeked and some of the non-web-savvy learnt that there is much to be found by collaborating with the geeks and letting them have a go at solving a certain issue. An interesting aspect for the techie in me is that almost every project was built on the open source community platform Drupal. Maybe we should take a closer look at that one.
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted by cheil at 5:58 AM | Comments (0)
Yesterday the Highland Fling conference in Edinburgh, Scotland had about 100 delegates in plush leather seats waiting to learn about "The Browser and Beyond".
The location was the same as last year, the 158-seater Symposium Hall, part of the Royal College of Surgeons in the centre of Edinburgh. Highland Fling is a very different conference insofar as it is the only one in Scotland covering web development and that it has a very cozy atmosphere. This is largely due to the passion of the organizers to push the local development community rather than staging a conference with commercially driven speakers and product showcases.
True to their word, this year even had a format I hadn't seen before in other conferences, with a leather sofa on stage next to swivel chair and the main lecture stand. The reason was that the presentations were limited to 40 minutes with 20 minutes interviews afterwards.
UK Podcaster Paul Boag chaired the event, introduced the different speakers and grilled them after their presentations with very clever interview questions partly made up by him but largely coming from the audience. Delegates were able to use Twitter, email or at the end even text messaging to hand their questions over to Paul. The benefit of this approach was that the Q&A sessions after the talks were much more focused and didn't end up with audience members trying to get personal agendas through rather than getting information all can benefit from. It is a much more efficient use of a short Q&A time.
The day kicked off with Mark Norman Francis talking about "The browser and before", a quick trip down memory lane with detailed information as to how the web came to be, what changes we faced in the past and how we got where we are now. The main message, however, was that the web is change and that as a professional developer you need to be aware of that.
My own presentation followed and revolved around the development of badges for distribution and the general shift of web design away from sites as destinations and pages as data containers towards a web of modules and a network of sites and applications hosting these. The slides are available on slideshare:
After the break Gareth Rushgrove talked about "Being a good web citizen", which was a great overview of how APIs change the web world we live in and what steps you need to take to develop a good API. He covered RESTful URL design, the need to understand HTTP and what output formats are handy to offer to developers. He agreed with my previous remark in my interview that the data you offer and the means to reach it are as much an interface as the web sites we design and need as much care and attention if we want to create a successful web of data and APIs.
Chris Mills of the Opera Developer Program explained the myth of the mobile web as an extra entity and the pros and cons of re-using web technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript on Mobile devices, specifically giving details about the Opera Mini browser and the CSS3 Media Query techniques. Chris also mentioned the web development curriculum he is currently putting together to educate students and developers who want to take their first steps in web development. Stay tuned for more information about this, as we are collaborating with Opera in this.
Aral Balkan followed with a high energy and enthuisiasm-filled presentation about Flash, what new related technologies like Flex and Air can bring to the web of the future and a detailed dispelling of myths revolving around Flash that have been formed in the late nineties and stick until today. Aral managed to convince a lot of people in the audience that Flash in indeed not 99% evil, but does play well with other technologies and is a lot more open than people generally believe it to be.
The day ended with Simon Willison explaining the wonderful hacky world of Comet and what this technology can bring to the table in terms of future development. Comet, if you haven't heard about it yet is a push technology that allows information and actions from several users in one application to be replicated live in all instances of the application. The main example was Google's Spreadsheets allowing several users to work on one spreadsheet and see live what other people are editing. Simon went in detail through all the browser hacks earlier Comet developers had to create before libraries like Dojo made it a lot easier. He also put his slides on slideshare:
The cozy atmosphere of the location also reflected on the speakers. Like last year there was a very natural flow from presentation to presentation and each presenter mentioned points made earlier and offered hints about the information coming in the following talks. This is not as common either and shows how much work there is actually in organizing a good event and find the right people to present for the audience you'd like to reach.
Speaking of the audience, it was good to see a mix of entrepreneurs, employees, students and even some people who came from Dundee and had taken part in our earlier University Hack Day there. It is a great feeling to be able to reach people who'd normally couldn't afford going to the large conferences.
I am very happy to have been part of Highland Fling again and I am looking forward to next year's stint up north.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted by cheil at 7:06 AM | Comments (1)
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