Schedule

Breaking Development will take place April 16th-18th in Orlando, Florida. Here's the preliminary schedule.

Monday, April 16, 2012

When? What?
7:30am- 9:00am Registration
8:00am- 8:30am Performance Implication of Mobile Design

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.

9:00am- 10:00am The Seven Deadly Myths of Mobile Presented by Josh Clark

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..

10:15am- 11:15am Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content Presented by Karen McGrane

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.

11:30am- 12:30pm The Mobile Browser World Presented by Peter-Paul Koch

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.

12:30pm- 2:00pm LUNCH
2:00pm- 3:00pm TOPIC COMING SOON Presented by Jenifer Hanen
3:15pm- 4:15pm TOPIC COMING SOON Presented by Stephen Hay
4:30pm- 5:30pm The Immobile Web Presented by Jason Grigsby

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.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

When? What?
8:00am- 8:30am Here Be Dragons: Mobile Web and the Enterprise

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.

9:00am- 10:00am The Mobile Frontier Presented by Rachel Hinman

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.
10:15am- 11:15am Context Bloody Context Presented by Cennydd Bowles

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.

11:30am- 12:30pm Rolling Up Our Responsive Sleeves Presented by Ethan Marcotte

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.

12:30pm- 2:00pm LUNCH
2:00pm- 3:00pm TOPIC COMING SOON Presented by Brian Fling
3:15pm- 4:15pm This Web Goes to 11 Presented by James Pearce

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.

4:30pm- 5:30pm Reset the Web Presented by Stephanie Rieger

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.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012 (Workshop Day)

When? What?
8:00am- 12:00pm Designing for Touch Presented by Josh Clark
12:00pm- 1:30pm LUNCH
1:30pm- 5:30pm Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness 101 Presented by Jason Grigsby & Lyza Danger Gardner