Hello! Burin

Apple implemented the W3C Geolocation API specification in Safari for their iPhone 3.0 software update, so this means iPhone optimized webapps will be able to do location-based features. Ah! GPS location vs IP-based lookups. So sexy! Location awareness doesn’t have to be a native-app only feature :)

Pair this with the local database storage offered in the HTML5 spec, and you may have a travel webapp that you can use OFFLINE on the iPhone. One proof of concept of the local db in action is Brandon Aaron’s jQuery docs browser for the iPhone.

Screenies of what you’d see!

zomg secret project or something?

Per site permission?!

Breakfast taco: overpriced and underfilling. That’s how I started my day. I dropped into the audience of the BizSpark Accelerator on the 6th floor in the Downtown Austin Hilton right next to the Convention Center and watched all these startups give their pitch.

Late morning I headed into the Green Room that wasn’t green but was apparently for VIPs. There was no shortage of crackers, fruit, and cheese. I had a lot of cheese. A lot. The gorgefest stopped once Sarah Kennedy reminded me with an “i hope you’re not lactose intolerant”. Safety first people, safety first.

Before the event, I chatted with Suzzane and Rich from weardrobe.com. Awesome people! I let it slip that I secretly admire their site. It’s okay, Suzzane said it’s because there are a lot of pretty girls there. Let’s just go with that.

Guy Kawasaki was in the Green-but-not-green room and I introduced myself. Next thing I get is unsolicited advice. If he were anyone else, I’d think he was a major douchebag but since this was Guy-effin Kawasaki in this particular context, it was okay. “Tell us wth you do.” Why thank you Mr. Kawasaki, let me go change my whole pitch because I thought I was going to tell you about what my grandmother did for a living! No really, I appreciated it! Honest!

Some organizers of the event kept thinking I was “the driver” for cubeless, aka the technogeek who would be controlling the computer.

No! I’m speaking. For the third time people, I’m speaking for cubeless!

They called the drivers away to hook up their machines. Away Erik walked.

Next up was me.

Started the morning off with some “More Secrets of JavaScript Libraries”. This was a major sausage fest, as expected. Very interesting topics on this panel, but I didn’t get to meet John Resig :( I should’ve known that there would be millions of fanboys. Brandon Aaron, why didn’t you warn me! So not worth it to fight fan boy sausage just to shake hands with an awesome javascript dude. There will be more opportunity.

After lunch and after missing the keynote by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, I checked into “The Future of Social Networks”, the preso by Charlene Li. Her one sentence summary? Social networks will be like air. Ubiquity and open standards are the future. Social network fatigue is a huge issue, especially for niche sites.

This night I stayed in like a sad sad little man and worked on my preso for the SxSW Accelerator. :) I might have even taken a bath in my handicapable bathtub or something.

After flying into Austin from Dallas like a douchebag (I really should’ve driven there), one of the first panels I went to was:

“My Boss Doesn’t Get It: Championing Social Media to the Man”

It was heavily skewed towards championing social media internally for externally facing social media initiatives, but there were many points that would be useful for pushing social media internally for internal use as well.

The thing to take away from this one was to set expectations early on and be patient. Reach is the value of social media, and one thing to ask is “how much would this cost me to have the equivalent effect in other campaigns?”

“Ohh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)”

This presentation showcased Easter eggs and nice treats across the web. Very interesting with a lot of oos and aas

“Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody”

Scam School guy Brian Brushwood gave an entertaining preso on social engineering and gave a fun show.

One of the side effects of depending on RJS is having a lot of unnecessary, ugly, and unsemantic (trying to stick with the u’s! ;x) markup.

First on our list for cubeless was to kill “div-itis”, an affliction many application developers suffer from(apparently). We had wrapper divs, clearing divs, placeholder divs, header divs, and divs sitting on the pages so that controllers could get a hook on to them — hooker divs.

Next up was to improve our hierarchical structure within the pages and just make our markup make some damn sense.

Another major task we did was remove tables for layout in a lot of places. These were scattered around all over the place with partials within partials with tables inside tables. I’ve noticed that it’s really easy to give up and use tables for layout, but giving in is like giving up on tests. If you do it, you make baby prophets cry.

As a side effect of following web standards on the front-end of cubeless we’ve cut down on filesizes, improved readability, and have again, brought sexy back.

Since the middle of last year we’ve peppered jQuery into a Prototype-heavy environment, and of course, it’s been playing nicely. We’ve been running on jQuery latest for much of the time too :)

This iteration we’ve started pulling out Rails helpers and have been using jQuery to hijack links and provide interaction instead. Our controllers aren’t spitting out as much retarded JavaScript, and we’re definitely very close to being able to rip Prototype out completely!

We had a smattering of JavaScript plugins that didn’t play well with other libraries, so we killed those and started using jQuery UI (datepickers, modals, etc)

In essence, we’ve annihilated a LOT of inline JavaScript, cleaned up controllers immensely, reduced filesizes, and pretty much brought sexy back.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working very closely with Brandon Aaron on the front-end of cubeless. It’s been a daunting task, but I’d say we’re emerging from the trenches with a much better foundation for our product! By following the standards and principles that have been ingrained in our heads by standardistas, we’ve had a number of sexy side effects, although Mr. jQuery professional can probably elaborate more on that.

I took a bunch of pictures of mewmew today! I dedicated an entire post to her lol

 Yesterday the Travel Studios dev team got their MacBook Pros! Hurrayyy! A couple weeks ago we did get a shipment in, although there were a few hiccups in the order. Something along the lines of getting too many of one type (business-level), and none of another type (development spec). It was seriously a tease.

But the MacBook Pros for the developers arrived, and happiness ensued.

2.5ghz sexy2duo
4gb sexy-ram
200gb 7200rpm sexy-hard-drive
512mb sexy-videoram
15″ led backlit sexy-lcd

Developing Ruby on Rails won’t be so painful anymore :) I can leave my personal MacBook Pro at home now lol

The only downside? I can’t tell the difference between my mac and my work mac :(

And yeah, we really need to do something about the chaos on our dog-bone table. It’s ridiculously wirey.

These past few months I’ve been looking into Human-Computer Interaction graduate programs. Despite the small size of the field, it’s been difficult narrowing down my choice of programs. I’ve been able to do it though!

• Carnegie Mellon – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Georgia Tech – Atlanta, Georgia
• Uppsala Universitet – Uppsala, Sweden

Now there’s always the question of whether I should or shouldn’t go, since going to school full-time at that level won’t allow me to work as much (meaning less monies). There’s also the fact that I could just work and go on with my life with only a bachelors. The demand for web developers is there, based on the number of calls I’m getting (especially in the Ruby on Rails arena), but I’m really interested in moving back towards design and focusing on creating usable systems.

The good news is that whatever decision I make, I’ll have a year to decide what I want to do! If I do decide to go, I’ll start my Masters in HCI in Fall 2009. If I don’t, then I’ll just be livin it up, working in a field where I’m doing what I love doing. Either way, I think I’d be pretty happy!