Greg Veen is explaining canvas. Showing several examples of both Flash and canvas animations.
Now showing Bespin, an online code editor that uses canvas. Very cool. I had forgotten about that project. Ben Galbraith used canvas instead of Flash for performance, font rendering and browser interaction.
Alon Salant is now showing a dashboard for a large scale storage cluster network that is written in Canvas. The dashboard graphs are rendered with a JQuery plugin called flot and canvas.
Highlighting exceptions allows people to quickly spot problem areas. Example slide was a bar chart full of gray bars with one very low bar that was red. Second example slide showed negative % change in red with other percentage values in black.
Everything on your dashboard will be a performance indicator but not necessarily a key performance indicator. Example: Total sales: 9.1M — the value looks good. But if the percent change YoY (year over year) is -13.6% then the total sales value isn’t very good at all. Choose the right data to display.
Design Fidelity – the longer the publication timeframe the higher the design fidelity. Daily newspapers have a low fidelity. Monthly magazines have a high fidelity.
The better the design:
He’s talking about iLike.com where, instead of getting a form to enter artists he likes, he was presented with a grid of artists (picture + title) that he could select bands he likes. At the bottom of the page he could see more artists or he could go to the homepage. Very much like Netflix.
He clicked through 10 pages of artists. The visual nature of the list piqued his curiousity.
Flying cars, trips to Jupiter and web fonts: three things we were supposed to have by 2010. Cranford Teague is a funny guy, this should be good.
I’m talking about pain-free design signoff for your clients, not you! If the client is happy, you’re happy.
–Paul Boag
Paul Boag uses his storytelling style to walk you through the bad side of how most designers go through the design process with clients and then offers his ideas on how to improve the process.
Pretty slides. League Gothic for the font. I’m definitely not the only designer in love with that font right now… Paul Boag flagged this panel on sitby.us. Would be cool to meet him…. Three overlapping disciplines (venn diagram on slide): business, design, development… Mentioned the Elliot Jay Stocks brouhaha.
This was not the most engaging panel. I got a couple of good bookmarks out of it though, particularly groupon.com and airbnb.com.
I’m getting more excited about SXSWi with each passing day. My wife pointed out to me yesterday that I’m now counting it down in days rather than weeks. We’re under two weeks now so I’m going to defend my geekness. Daily feels right. T-minus 12 days and counting…if you’re wondering.
I’m doing something a little different and self-serving today. I’m posting the list of SXSW Interactive panels that I’ve bookmarked for consideration. I’m kind of all over the map this year. I knew going in that I would be interested in all things iPhone and iPad this year. I have ideas for two different apps I want to build.
I surprisingly found myself bookmarking lifehacking sessions. Things like improving my memory, using social media to live cheaply, and building your dream life.
I’m also apparently still very interested in improving my design process and how I manage and work with project owners. And I apparently I want to become a professional blogger, except that I don’t, so those panels might get the axe. In theory I really like publishing content. In reality it’s damn hard work.
As usual some timeslots have half-a-dozen panels I’m interested in while others have none or maybe one.
Are you going to SXSWi? What panels are you going to?