A Look Back At MLK Day
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
– James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
– James Baldwin
Repeat of last year, starting with the following events:
and
2018 IA Summit (Chicago, IL)
A response I gave to Roger Johansson (@rogerjohansson) on Twitter (please read through the whole thread):
From my view, it seems that front-end development has split into two camps: one web-focused, one app-focused.
@iwilsonjr (6:20 PM · Jul 8, 2017) – https://twitter.com/iwilsonjr/status/883812973730570244
“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.”
– Blaise Pascal
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”
– W.B. Yeats
Today, I start a new job and adventure – UX developer with CQ Roll Call, a company that has been historically documenting the legislative history of the country for the past 72 years.
It has been an interesting four months away from full-time work, going through the process of applying and interviewing for jobs – something that I hadn’t done in 10+ years. Obviously, applying for a front-end developer position as changed during this time. Unfortunately, some things haven’t changed since I last went job hunting. [Hint: JavaScript is not Java.]
That said, there are a number of people that I would like to give thanks to the following:
Thanks to all of you.
And now…forward…
(In response to Adam Silver’s Stop using device breakpoints)
There are two points that I like to add –
Content will always affect Constraints (i.e. breakpoints) and vice versa.
What I do is a) use the familiar set of breakpoints as initial guesses and b) treat them as assumptions that need to be tested and verified.
If you’re getting more breakpoints, maybe you need to reconsider your initial ones. Some may just need to be:
This is probably more a developer than designer problem(?) but depends on your background. It comes down to hands-on knowledge of various devices.
The idea here is to get use to the idea of breakpoints as initial guides, not fixed points.
As I’m writing this, it’s a rainy morning in Vancouver, Canada. Nothing new. Spending time with friends that I don’t see but once a year near my birthday. In this case, I’m here to attend the IA Summit conference this week. This is my first non-US conference since IxDA Interaction 13 in Toronto.
Looking back at that conference there were a number of things that stood out. A number of them became influential years later. One of them was a short lecture by a designer named Nate Archer called “Beyond Responsive”.
Nate Archer: Beyond Responsive from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
Well, four years later, those words seem prescient right now. The world has been filled with all sorts of devices that we access the web. More than just the trio of phone/tablet/desktop. Basically, any device that has access to the web is an access point – from watches to 4000K TVs. But there is another way of looking at this. Instead of “devices”, let us consider going in the direction of “inputs”. Responsive design appeared not just with mobile devices but devices which are also touch-enabled. Now, mobile devices are as ubiquitous as any household device, front-end developers like myself have to deal with coding for interactions that take place on touchpad as much (or even more) than mouse/keyboard. (Though we could be doing a better job at the keyboard then we are currently doing.)
[Note: touch-enabled devices are not necessary phones/tables and doing feature support for touch is still a bit tricky]
In some respects, the beautiful lie of responsive design is that the constraints are visual, via breakpoints and media queries? But what if those constraints aren’t visual. CSS has hidden artifacts describing inputs – media types. If one would look at the specs (https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/media.html#media-types), the following types are supported:
screen, print, speech/aural, handheld, tty, etc.
Screen is the most familiar with print/speech following. But there’s tty? From the spec, tty refers to devices like terminals and teletypes. The later was a telecommunication device that has long since disappeared with the advent of email. But back in the day, it was considered important enough to be considered in the W3C CSS spec. Now think about the future. Someday, will we may consider mouse/keyboard interactions as obsolete as teletype?
Now, we are seeing the advent of AI interfaces – sophisticated interfaces that allow access to the same information like we do with mouse/keyboard and touch.
Which comes back to the conference I’m attending, IA Summit. This year’s topic is artificial intelligence and information architecture. The main job of a front-end developer is building interfaces for acquiring information. Obviously, things will change in the next couple of years. But change into what?