Changes are now!

Tags

css, html, responsive

It is time that we engage in a broader conversation, through our blogs, google+, twitter and other collaborative tools you may add to the process. Web design has been changing over the last year or so, and today we find ourselves with better languages (html5, css3 at least) and better concepts for our frameworks and support apps such as Less (lesscss.org), Sass (sass-lang.com), Twitter’s Bootstrap (twitter.github.com.bootstrap) and support files in html5 Boilerplate (html5boilerplate.com) and Andy Clarke’s 320 And Up (stuffandnonsense.co.uk/320andup). We also need to pay full attention to Responsive Web Design ( http://alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design ), which is rapidly becoming the best practice of the era of numberless devices that web designers must include whenever we design a new interactive project.

Where to begin is not easy to figure out. Perhaps the best place to begin is to get a more collaborative and focused conversation started between students and instructors, students and students, all of us and others in the broader global community of web designers.

This blog is about to become more active, actually a new version of Webstuff2, perhaps Webstuff3 to indicate a next level. It is not easy to write regularly, but there is too much going on to simply hold on to it, or try to slip it into a curriculum that is becoming somewhat stifled. I firmly believe that a curriculum is more than what happens in the classroom however, and it is time to find out how much we can grow, just because we want to learn more, and be the best at what we are doing.

This intro to the “webstuff3 era” will be followed with an article about Responsive web design, as well as a list of resources that everyone should be reading. More soon.

Articles about Web Design

I have just posted a link to a Word document that contains direct links to a group of articles available from the Peachpit.com/articles website. These articles are by authors of recent books related to web design or they are actual chapters from books. I listed these to suggest that this is a way of keeping up with the latest resources as well as get in touch with authors you may not have read before. There is a wealth of material about progressive enhancement, html5, css3, designing with grids, and other interesting design issues. To get to the list go to my ftp site and the resources at the bottom of the page, Articles & Books. Look for the “alistofarticles.doc” link to download the linked titles. I will add a list of relevant books in a short time. If you go to the peachpit site, articles section, and select the “web design & development” topic from the left side menu,  you’ll find many more articles on other topics of interest for your reading.

Sharing resources

In the interest of sharing the wide variety of resources this instructor uses, my Netvibes account has been expanded to include most of my netvibes tabs which can be found at http://www.netvibes.com/wayneb#Home. The delicious account is simply http://delicious.com/wayneb. If you have problems accessing my sites, please let me know.

It’s time! (for HTML5)

This week we begin full focus on HTML5 in our web design/interactive media web scripting courses (client-side and server-side). The modular nature of the release of HTML5 and CSS3 assets have been available for some time, and will probably be completed by the end of the year or early next year. We only work with what is fully usable, and experiment a bit with future features, but it is a different, more efficient and semantic way of coding sites. The new html5 document structure begins with simplicity: . This is a great improvement over the 2 line doctypes from HTML and XHTML.

The early books about HTML5 are still forthcoming, but we can recommend a few  books to help you get started.

Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson, & Remy Sharp, 2011. New Riders, ISBN 0321-687299, $34.99. http://www.introducinghtml5.com

Also check with Safari Books Online (through our library) for more new titles available to read free through the schools online account.

Hardboiled Web Design, by Andy Clarke, 2010. Five Simple Steps, ISBN 9781907828011. http://www.hardboiledwebdesign.com

HTML5: Up and Running, by Mark Pilgrim, 2010. O’Reilly Media. ISBN 10: 0-596-80602-7

If students are interested, we can provide a 1-2 hr workshop about HTML5 to help you get started.

How I manage information

I manage digital information differently according to what I am doing and the context of the process. I generally browse from my Netvibes RSS listings, or from more detailed subscriptions from NetNewsWire which is a high-end Mac content aggregator that automatically synchronizes with Google Reader. (I like the security of having my desktop aggregator duplicated with a cloud based system). NetVibes contains the frequently accessed subscribed sites, while NetNewsWire is a more extensive collection of subscriptions.

I typically browse RSS feeds beginning in Netvibes. I quickly tag anything I want to capture with a bookmarklet icon that takes me directly to delicious.com. In Delicious tag with a generic tag (css), a more specific tag (css3_tutorial), and sometimes added specificity (css3_queries_tutorial). When I am short on time I create a “READ” tag, which takes me back to articles I want to read in the very near future.

I also carry a Moleskine pocket notebook to Collect other types of information. It goes everywhere I go, and collects anything I want to collect. I also have a Moleskine for books/authors/publisher data in which I keep a lengthy list of new books that I think are important.

If I am going to post several articles, I use Marsedit, a Mac app that is a great outside editor which can add images, links, etc. and then automatically post to whatever blog I wanted to post to. I have multiple blogs so this is a handy and quick tool for getting a lot of posting done. It is also easy to create drafts, then go back and add to them and edit.

I am not a friendly FaceBook user, but do check it occasionally and get more links reminding me to than I choose to pay attention to. I also use Linkedin, with about the same amount of enthusiasm! I prefer searching subscribed resources and constantly updating my storage of articles and files that I can then find instantly.

More to come. Your process and any interesting tools you use to learn with, would be welcome comments.

Managing information

Tags

learning, personal learning environment, social networking

George Siemens stated that “The most critical skill that individuals need to master today is how to manage information.” Skills such as critical thinking, detecting information that is not accurate, creating personal learning networks, and similar 21st century skills are all based on how we manage information. This is the focus of our Fundamentals Of IMD course, that involves experiencing social networking tools that can become an extension of how we learn in a digital world. Hopefully, you continue to build your personal learning environment that began in Fundamentals.

It is important to learn the topics of our domains of study such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PhP, Flash, image manipulation, and planning processes. But these languages and tools are constantly changing as are the types of problems potential clients will ask us to solve.

We will only be as successful as the way we manage the overwhelming maze of information that is available to us. We are only as “smart” as the way we choose to manage the information that is the basis of our domains.

How do you manage information? What tools and processes have you developed and customized to support your design creativity? What networks or communities have your found that support your domain of learning?

If you only do your assignments, you may not develop the real skills necessary to become a successful designer. If you only create what teachers ask you to create in classes, you may never find out how to solve real problems that will confront you when you graduate.

I will add another article here about how I manage information, and I encourage you to share your methods and practices as a comment to this blog, or in discussions with your peers and instructors.

iPhone Web Apps with Dashcode

For those of you wanting to learn to develop for the iPhone, there is a very good article/tutorial on Mobiforge.com about using DashCode, one of Apple’s development tools available from our iPhone Dev Kit at AID. A
web app is different from the “native applications” as sold in the AppStore. These web apps are created with JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML via the excellent DashCode dev tool. Check out the tutorial for a better understanding of the types of web apps you can create and a beginning tutorial to see how fantastic the DashCode tool is to use. Dashcode is available in labs 302, 317, and 300. More on this topic later…

Mobiforge

New TechFlex Meetup

I received a “Meetup” invite to a new flex user group some of you may be interested in. It appears that their first meeting will be at an event TechFlex09 to be held Friday, November 13, 2009, from 8am – 5pm at the

Dallas/Plano Marriott at Legacy Town Center
7120 Dallas Parkway
Plano, TX 75024
There is a fee for the event but it appears that the usergroup will form from this first event, so there should be monthly usergroup meetings also. The event is sponsored by Miller & Assoicates with Mike Smith and Matt Bugbee (AID Grad) part of the presenters for the event.

Check it out at: http://www.meetup.com/TexFlex09/?gj=wg2_ej1b.

Is the web design market changing?

Have you ever considered that new technologies may in fact be shrinking our market for “web design”? And what of the rise of frameworks and libraries and a growing use of content management systems such as WordPress by professional developers? Robert Capps “The Good enuf rvlutn” in Wired’s September ’09 issue is a must read that may find us discussing these types of issues on the forefront of the information and communication technologies challenge.

I have personally felt for some time now that we needed to bring mobile design into our program, and as I researched it I found a rich and exciting new type of opportunity. While mobile applications – the sophisticated games and location aware apps and all the unique tools that you can’t live without get all the attention, there is also a world of integration between standard web sites and mobile websites. There is much that can be developed with XHTML/CSS/Javascript given the outstanding tools that Apple provides for the iPhone development process. These development tools are now available to our students through our Developer status with Apple. But I also realize that if we eventually are primarily designing for mobile sites rather than desktops, what will that mean for our industry? What effect will “good enough” have in the process?

The Capps article describes how “entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience”. Pure Digital, makers of the Flip video camera, made the discovery that good enough tech that is cheap, fast, and simple works every time. (The Flip just got challenged with Apple’s new Nano, as another example). And everyone knows that mp3 recordings are poor quality compared to CD’s, but the added advantage of take it with you everywhere cheaply and conveniently has become more important than fidelity.

Clay Shirkey, quoted in the article, sums up with “there comes a point at which improving upon the thing that was important in the past is a bad move”. Other examples of this concept in the article bring the point home and causes one to stop and ponder. What is the real purpose of our projects and where is web/mobile based communication heading? Or we may see these changes and discover the new types of opportunities that we will be privileged to develop!

Ugrade your WordPress now!

Tags

upgrading-WordPress

There was a “worm” reported over the weekend that is seriously affecting older versions of WordPress that are located on private hosting environments. WordPress.com sites are not affected as they are automatically updated to the latest versions as they are released.

It is serious, and not very visible unless you know what you are looking for. Please read the following articles to get the details:
From Matt Mullenweg: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/
and from WordPress.org on how to upgrade: http://codex.wordpress.org/upgrading_wordpress/
and if you have problems: http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2008/06/24/how-to- completely-clean-your-hacked-Wordpress-installation/

It is not panic time, but it is serious and you should upgrade quickly to avoid any problems.