Who You Calling A Jesse?

This Saturday is BarCampWaterloo (number 6!) from 1pm to around 7pm (we may retire to the pub before that) at the Accelerator Centre. A much more toned down event compared to StartupCampWaterloo, BarCampWaterloo is where people come to explore ideas and maybe get themselves ready for a DemoCampGuelph (which happens to be April 9th at the Albion in Guelph). I might show some of the stuff I have been working on this weekend ;)

DesignCampWaterloo is March 26th (Wednesday)27th (Thursday) starting at 4:30pm in the Tathum Centre on the University of Waterloo campus. The first one was a bit difficult to follow being in the SLC and all so I am really looking forward to it in the TC. Plus I just have to go up two floors from my office to attend!

There is also a RailsNite next week on Monday at Ceaser Martini’s. Not sure of the start time but I think 7ish might work.

Update: RailsNite does start at 7pm and there is a Facebook event created for it.

Another update: Rick Segal is not coming to Waterloo for his VC roundtable, but he is coming to Guelph on April 28th… Perhaps Ali is influencing people now.

Yet another update: DesignCampWaterloo is Thursday not Wednesday.

You work on something for a couple weeks and then the due date comes close. There is a realization that you won’t meet the milestone unless you get a lot of code written today and deal with whatever UI issues and browser bugs you can. You order in some pizza, fill up on caffeine, and push through a 16 hour or more work day. There is something about that role you get on when you don’t leave your computer, things just make more sense.

My GUI team of co-op students have been pushing themselves this past week and this evening I think they achieved more tonight than all of last week. People will have to wait until May 1st to see it but our internal deadline is much earlier (demos to some stakeholders first and we need April to bug hunt). Maybe I will demo a bit at DemoCampGuelph in April or BarCampWaterloo ;)

Just wanted to post a just over mid-term thanks to Daniel, Shawn, Allen, and Michael for the commitment. They have gone from CS or Engineering students to fairly good AJAX developers in a very short time period. They have made some cool stuff, can’t wait to show it off.

Interesting conversation today that started off with (edited for dramatic effect):

• me: “I am pretty sure what we are doing is not going to be accessible and is going to cause us grief” (me went on about Ontarians with Disabilities Act, University’s commitment to accessibility, etc)
• softeng1: “What will? AJAX? I am sure it can be made accessible” – goes to google, pulls up an article from Juicy Studio
• softeng2: “What exactly is not following the law?”

At this point I probably got annoying because the problem with accessibility is that it is an art over a science. Laws are vague for good reason—there is no black and white, if there was technology would make the law redundant quickly (thinking PDF being a ‘bad technology’ in Australia). I went into the fact screen readers have a heck of a time when things change and there is no page refresh and how stuff not working, at least a little, without js is a problem.

The conversation went on with the software developers insisting there is a software solution. Which is understandable but that is because I got annoyed with the brush off instead of going into the problem. Making a web application accessible isn’t only about using screen reader, I missed that but I am not sure that would have helped…

After the conversation dragged on for a bit we started talking a similar language although the focus was on fixing it with software and testing. I am all for testing but I certainly don’t want to go back and test it in a year and then fix it. I would much rather consider it now. Making a web application accessible is as much about a philosophy as it is the technical considerations.

This left me thinking, my approach was wrong for how these folks think and their experience. Plus I was annoyed by the number of JavaScript reliant things we have already. My concerns are that even though we are spending a lot of time on user testing and usability analysis, technical accessibility would be sacrificed. Are my fears warranted? Probably given the amount of JavaScript, however if we approach it smartly from start we should be ok—that means now.

I have run into a similar conversation quite a few years ago when the web developers on campus weren’t sure what to think about web accessibility. They were far more open to the problem though, not software engineers (or Computer Scientists) as they can build a fix—so they think. What is missing from their world is the appreciation for how annoying web browsers can be and how people interact with them. With software there is more control over presentation and the user expectations are different.

I will need to think about an approach to ensure that the issue of accessibility is more relevant to them. Taking away their mice as they navigate the app might be a good start ;) Or degrading its performance. Most web developers seem to get the problem now but they have likely spent time reading about in the context of the web. Curious as to how others have approached this situation with those that build software, not web apps.

First I think I need to get a few good nights of sleep. The lack of that lately does not help!

Next week (December 4th) sees two pretty exciting campus conferences happening. The first is WatITis – a one day conference for IT staff at the University of Waterloo. Would you believe there are just over 300 IT staff at Waterloo working in dozens of different departments? This will be the first year I am not presenting (current job’s stuff isn’t presentation ready yet) and I am not sure I will have time to attend… but it is a really good event.

The following day is the Power of IDEAS conference. This one is open to anyone for a really low price (below $100 for off campus folks, free to on campus people) and focusing on inclusive learning strategies, usability, and accessibility. Derek Featherstone did the keynote for the first one in the summer of 2006, this year he returns for the closing keynote. I will be presenting on building usable web applications and will offer a glimpse of what I am doing in the lower level of the TC as well as some reflection on other higher education home pages and other applications I have worked on over the years.

Keep an eye on the Power of IDEAS conference. Lead by the Office for Persons with Disabilities office, it will only grow (this year there are over 90 people from off campus registered, last year we had around 20). I think it is just great that a conference dedicated to promoting accessibility and usability.

Under what I think is the wrong category, the iPhone is named Invention of the Year by Time. It’s not an ‘invention’ at all though, unless you count the overall phone, PDA, and billing experience. Apple has maybe invented a better process for mobile computing and cellular networks. The iPhone is an enabling technology through its experience, not through its email, browser, etc. It makes the mobile device easy to use and thus inspires a load of developers to mimic that experience on their applications. For that, it is just amazing. The iPhone should get gadget of the year—which it probably will, voting is still open.

Having only played with an iPhone, owned a Blackberry and an Nokia E62, and still have to deal with the moronic customer service of Canadian cellular providers my opinion is purely based on observation but it is pretty obvious that the inability (or lack of motivation) to provide the activation, service, and billing experience that comes with AT&T in the US is what is stopping Rogers from offering the iPhone.

I still want a real keyboard btw… N810 with the iPhone OS would be perfect.

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

Looking to browse book covers but not wanting to walk down to the book store? Check out Zoomii. You can fly around the book shelves and get a feel for the book size, select what you want, and then purchase it through Amazon.

Chris Theisson has been busy over the last few months showing off his new Amazon affiliate site Zoomii to folks at DemoCampGuelph, DemoCampToronto, and BarCampWaterloo.

This store shows you 20 000 or so book covers and their relative size. You can simply browse the shelf and check out the interesting looking books. For an AJAX based site it is just amazing to fly around the book shelves. I love how fast it is and the search results are just nicer than what Amazon normally gives you. If you are a visual person, this store is certainly more fun than the typical Amazon experience. You have to bounce over to Amazon to make your purchase (maintains your comfort level with Amazon).

If you want to try it out I have a couple invites available to me so just post a comment.