SXSW Interactive 2007

Here’s a few writeups of concurrent panels this morning. It’s amazing how fast this stuff gets posted…

• Under 18: Blogs, Wikis and Online Social Networkin Sites for Youth
• Emerging Social and Technology Trends
• Emerging Social & Technology Trends
• Emerging Social and Technology Trends
• Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses
• Kathy Sierra
• The Influence of Art in Design
• TV: The Next Generation
• After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration
• From Tags to Riches: Life After Code
• Grids are Good and How to Design With Them

Updated Sunday 4:39pm. I’m sure there will be more.

Kathy Sierra’s presentation was incredible. She is such a great speaker. I took some notes on her keynote but honestly couldn’t keep up with everything she said. Her speech was mostly on the idea of interacting with users like they are human. Her books all follow these same lines. Her Head First series taught me Java, and did so in a way that I actually enjoyed, which is a rare quality for a technical book.

A few things in her presentation caught my attention. She had a very good slideshow to compliment her talking points and always had something interesting on screen. She occasionally threw in gratuitous pictures of puppydogs, I think, to make the following slide sink in more with the audience. The actual content of her speech was making your apps more human, and not doing so in the way most marketers think. In absence of being able to have the computer interpret human-interactive things like facial expressions and gestures, she says, your app should have ways to let users become passionate, not just proficient, at using it.

Thats her keynote in a nutshell. I probably didn’t do it justice; it was the best speech I’ve heard so far.

Notes from the Decade of Style panel.

• Panel
  • Chris Wilson worked on Mosaic, CSS in IE3+
  • Doug Bowman
  • Molly Holzschlag, WaSP lead
  • Eric Meyer, CSS guru
• Key Events
  • CSS Zen garden
• Biggest Missing Piece?
  • Wilson says need a comprehensive CSS test suite
  • Bowman says need variables & constants in CSS
  • Holzschlag says a reliable WSIWYG editor
• Has the working group lost its way?
  • Wilson thinks it has too tough a challenge
  • Holzschlag thinks W3C has “lost its way”
• Hardest part of CSS?
  • Wilson (an MSIE engineer) admits “with IE7, we know we dont get everything right; big surprise”
  • He says backwards-compatability is the hardest thing
  • Holzschlag says teaching people to design with CSS and not just know its syntax is the hardest part.
• How does CSS differ from designing in general?
  • Bowman says CSS is not fundamentally a design tool, it is a tool for implementing design.