Schedule for Breaking Development Orlando 2012

Mobile design is hard, and there are many challenges to talk about. When deciding between mdot, RWD or Mobile First, you probably read a lot about media queries, box-shadows, javascript support and more.

However, your mobile design decision also comes with performance implications. Each design philosophy has some obvious and some less obvious bottlenecks. Do you redirect three times before getting to your mdot site? Does your mobile page weigh 2 MB because of its responsive design? Does it take forever to enhance your mobile first site on a desktop?

This session will go over the main bottlenecks each approach has, and offer some do's and don'ts. We'll take apart some real world websites, share some tricks and browser implementation insights, and show what was the RIGHT way to do things.

By the end of the presentation, you'll be able to factor performance into your mobile design decision, and know how to make your mobile website - regardless of how you designed it - as fast as it can be.

A set of stubborn myths are driving the development of mobile experiences that frustrate more than delight. "Info snacking." "The distracted, rushed mobile user." Those behaviors don't always, or even usually, exist, yet too often we design solely for those contexts, creating mobile apps as lite versions of their desktop counterparts. Instead, mobile apps should almost always do MORE than their desktop counterparts. "Tapworthy" author Josh Clark explains the difficult craft of designing simple interfaces for complex mobile apps, sharing techniques for future-friendly mobile efforts and, along the way, debunking seven stubborn mobile myths..

For years, we've been telling designers: the web is not print. You can't have pixel-perfect layouts. You can't determine how your site will look in every browser, on every platform, on every device. We taught designers to cede control, think in systems, embrace web standards. So why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will "live" on a web page? Why do we give in when they demand a WYSIWYG text editor that works "just like Microsoft Word"? Worst of all, why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? What worked for the desktop web simply won't work for mobile. As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up. Karen will talk about how we have to adapt to creating more flexible content.

In this presentation, PPK will describe the mobile world and its 8 to 10 most important players. He'll try to make sense of a confusing ecosystem that web developers will need to learn to know better, and he will go way beyond just iPhone and Android.

Why is Apple so succesful (apart from the quality of its products)? How bad is the Android fragmentation going to be? What about Windows Phone, Tizen, Nokia, Samsung, and all the rest? This session will give you some insight in these important questions.

Designing and developing for mobile devices can be overwhelming in the sheer amount of factors to consider. Questions of where get started or how to retool for fast and lovely mobile sites can send one screaming for the supposed safety of Webkit before running and hiding under an iOS rock. But such fear and trembling is unnecessary and we can go forth in confidence with the minimalist's guide on data sipping as a legitimate lifestyle, serving responsive images, how to strip that code, and do I really need all this Javascript?

In our industry, everything changes quickly, usually for the better. We have more and better tools for creating websites and applications that work across multiple platforms. Oddly enough, design workflow hasn't changed much, and what *has* changed is often for worse. Through the years, increasing focus on bloated client deliverables has hurt both content and design, often reducing these disciplines to fill-in-the-blank and color-by-numbers exercises, respectively. Old-school workflow is simply not effective on our multiplatform Web.

In this session, Stephen explores at a content-based approach to design workflow which is grounded in our multiplatform reality, not fixed-width Photoshop comps and overproduced wireframes. You'll learn how to avoid being surprised by the realities of multiplatform websites. You'll learn how to better manage client expectations and development requirements. You've probably heard of designing in the browser; in this session you'll learn a practical approach for actually doing it.

Device diversity is about to get an order of magnitude worse. SmartTVs are hitting the market in mass this year. Sony, LG, Vizio, and Samsung are all shipping televisions with Google TV built in.

And if the rumors that Apple will release a TV this year are true, 2012 will turn out to be the year web developers start to tackle the glass screen hanging on our walls.

Why should web developers focused on mobile learn about the web on TVs? Because TVs represent the next challenge in device proliferation. They share common characteristics with their smaller brethren. They create new challenges and opportunities we haven't encountered yet. And most importantly, learning how to build for TVs helps inform our practices of building for mobile devices.

One web! Responsive web design! Mobile first! Inspired by the amazing talks you've heard at the mobile web conference, you return to work ready to tackle your next big mobile web project. Wow, it's a Fortune 500 company! "They thought that newspaper project was cool," you tell yourself, "wait until they see what we do with this!" You're going to change the world!

Wait, what do you mean mobile isn't part of the web division? They call this a budget? And who are these other jokers you have to deal with in eCommerce?

In this presentation, we'll arm you with an awareness of some common pitfalls you may face when dealing with enterprise clients, and show you some strategies to combat or avoid them, so your next project emerges as a shining beacon of mobile web innovation.

Today, mobile feels a lot like the wild west - filled with the frenetic energy of unbound optimism. Yet all too often, the review mirror effect is at play. Instead of embracing the spirit of invention, too often people try to recreate the desktop computing experience on a mobile device. Humans have two legs - making us inherently mobile beings. Yet for the last 50 years, we've all settled into a computing landscape that assumes a static context of use.

The most exciting aspect of mobile user experience is that it is offering us the opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information.

Invention and exploration of a new and unsettled landscape can be daunting proposition for designers and developers working in time and resource constrained environments. Where do you look? In this talk, Rachel will cover three emergent mobile UX themes that will become important to mobile computing in the years to come. They are:

• Shapeshifting: Advice for how to think about and create experiences that span and scale across multiple devices.
• A Brave NUI World: Defining differences between graphical user interfaces and the emergent world of mobile natural user interfaces as well as advice for traversing the NUI/GUI chasm.
• Comfortable Computing: How the proliferation of mobile devices like tablets is ushering in an age of computing that is less about efficiency and tasks, and more about providing people with a sense of comfort and connection.

If you've been in the mobile field for a while, you're sick of context debates. Sure, they all start innocently, but soon enough they collapse into a sad tangle of metaphysics ("But what IS context anyway?"), lazy stereotypes, and implausible scenarios involving public transport. So let's try a fresh approach. Dictionary definitions and "it depends" generalizations are hereby banned. Let's talk details. We'll discuss whether context even matters in modern web design, ways to find out how people will use your product, design principles for different situations, and why we've been looking at the whole thing upside-down anyway.

There's been healthy discussion about the fundamentals of responsive design, combining fluid grids and media queries to create more flexible, device-agnostic sites. So does that mean responsive design is a magic formula that solves all our problems? Well, no. But thankfully, we didn't get into web design because we wanted to be bored. In this session we'll review strategies for handling trickier elements that'd make even the most seasoned designer quail: stuff like advertising, complex layouts, deep navigation patterns, third-party media, and, yes, actual, honest-to-goodness content.

For over 10 years Brian Fling has been designing for mobile apps and devices. In that time he has discovered a variety of techniques and methods not to just create a beautiful visual language, but to create meaningful products that have the power to change people’s lives.

In this session, Brian uses the design principles of Dieter Rams, Mies van der Rohe, and Steve Jobs—as well as his own insights and experience—to create a simple framework you can use for creating amazing mobile designs.

You've made your web site fit a 320px screen, but you had a hunch there was more to this whole mobile thing than that. And now you're thinking about geolocation, social design, photo uploading, NFC and augmented reality. Wait, what? CSS3 didn't prepare you for this.

The web is getting a whole lot more exciting, and mobile's at the vanguard. The boundaries between browser and device, device and user - as well as between users and their friends - are where many of its unexplored opportunities lie.

Let's talk about what works, what doesn't, what should, and what will - and discuss the real possibilities and opportunities that standardized device and network APIs can offer. Our hopes and dreams for a rich, contextual, social web will depend on them.

Midway through a project, a client of ours recently said "One thing I'm learning is that it's ok to give up on the desktop experience once it stops making sense". This wasn't an isolated incident. In fact, i'm beginning to think desktop web sites stopped making sense quite a while ago. We've just had nothing viable to replace them with. Mobile apps have given us a glimpse, but I think they're merely a glimpse into something bigger.

Mobile isn't merely a new stage in the evolution of the web, it's not even merely a new context, it's the very early stages of an entirely new system. A system that has already started to shape our environment, affect the way we live, how we choose to connect with others, and how we're able to spend our time. A system that is also slowly unravelling our assumptions and causing us to question the very reason we build web sites, why people visit them, and where the true value of the web actually lies.