Tuesday, March 20, 2012
In Denver for DrupalCon. Breakfast with Eric D at Pi Kitchen and Bar, the restaurant in our hotel. The breakfast buffet is about $16 if you have hot items, about $10 if you have the continental breakfast. Eric likes the Dazbog coffee. (Throughout the next 5 days I include the notes I took at some of the DrupalCon sessions and might not necessarily fully explain them all.) We attend Dries's keynote. Strengths: community. Weaknesses: (a) rudimentary authoring experience, (b) aging web dev framework, (c) small Drupal talent pool. D8 will embrace Symfony. Concentrate on 3 audiences: developers, site visitors, authors. More stuff is going in core to improve the out-of-the-box experience. I am still sick with a cold all day today, so I visit Walgreen's to get some new supplies: three boxes of ultra soft Kleenex tissues and more Mucinex, this time with DM. Walgreen's is only a few blocks away, so I walk it and although it's really cold I survive. Back to the convention center. David Needham (@davidneedham): Beginning Theming. Slides at http://is.gd/upafeh . I took this session knowing that I already knew a lot of it, but it has been a long time since my theming training and a long time since I did any Drupal theming that I felt like I needed it for review. In addition to a refresh, I got a few things that were helpful. He mentioned the Style Guide module which I'm not yet using in any site. Another: Theme Developer module. The Theme Developer module is buggy, so don't leave it enabled all the time. Krumo collapses vars. eg, dsm($vars). On the screen David used Komodo Edit. Links: is.gd/denvertheming and is.gd/lvlupthemer . The theme key module enables you to specify a different theme for a specific page. Lunch in Hall A: veggie wrap, granny smith apple, water. I set up Chatter on my iPhone. Eric showed his Lensse camera stabilizer. Continued with afternoon sessions.—Johan Falk: Essential knowledge for Drupal beginners. I left this talk after only a few minutes because it was too basic for me.—Brad Haynes: The Design Revolution or The Creative Approach. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that add value. 4 areas that feed into the creative approach: (1) embracing failure, (2) storytelling, (3) designing everything, (4) design as a differentiator. (1) We should take risks and learn from our mistakes. (2) left brain versus right brain, divergent versus convergent thinking, Sir Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms on YouTube, Nicholas Felton: information designer and cofounder of daytum.com, a home for collecting and communicating your daily data. Facebook timeline: humanizing the web. Google, Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown. Project re:brief: "advertising re-imagined" for the web. Coca Cola: The new ads: Hilltop: "I'd like to buy the world a Coke." Reimagining: people can buy a Coke for someone else around the world via mobile phone, custom text message accompanies delivery, Google Translate translates the text, vending machine takes video or photo of recipient. (3) designing everything: "Design is a visual form of storytelling." People need to understand your decisions, so be strategic in your thinking and communication. Career evolution in advertising: people maintain fewer and fewer skills the higher the rank on the corporate ladder. Principles of design: unity, emphasis, balance, proportion, contrast, movement, rhythm, variety, space. These principles of design can be applied to anything in business. (4) design as differentiator. Simple: a banking website: mint.com taken a step further. What's interesting is that Simple is in an industry that hasn't enjoyed much great design before. More examples: Nest thermometer, Path website (it's fun to use, a delightful experience). Integrate holistic design at the core of the product.—My review of Brad Haynes: The Design Revolution: I found very little value in this talk. It took him 13 minutes to communicate that we should take risks and learn from our mistakes. It took him a long time to state his points, and when they finally arrived, they weren't very enlightening. They're common sense (learn from your mistakes) or they might apply only in certain situations (not every design team needs the same number of visual designers as interaction designers). He chose some interesting examples, but I did not see a strong relationship between those examples and design. I plan to avoid talks by Brad Haynes in the future.—John Albin Wilkins: Rethinking responsive building techniques with Drupal. He's the maintainer of the Zen theme. "Mobile first" really kind of means "content first" which really kind of means "users first." Fields in Drupal 7 make this easier. Example of good responsive website: palantir.net. The Fences module enables you to provide semantics to fields. It keeps your code lean by leaving out unnecessary div wrappers. The Field Collection module works really well with Fences. If you build layouts with Chaos Tools, you can use them in either Panels or Display Suite. For responsive images, try the Adaptive Image (best solution right now) or Borealis (new as of this week) modules. Natural (specified by your content) versus unnatural (specified by devices in use today) breakpoints for screen size. Better to do natural than unnatural. See palantir.net blog for details. Opera Mini browser share for mobile has increased dramatically over the years. (But he doesn't compare this data to iPhone or Android, so it's hard to see the relative growth.) For mobile testing, use the Opera Mini Simulator (web-based), the Opera Mobile Emulator (desktop-based), the iPhone and iPad Simulators (for OS X, included with XCode 4 in the Mac app store), and the Android Emulator. Sass, zengrids.com. Various responsive layout techniques. Compass (included in Sass?) enables you to forget about things like vendor-specific prefixes.—mortendk. Nathan Haug: Webform 3. slides at his quicksketch site. I think I took a nap. John K, Eric D, and I took a cab to the Drupal party at City Hall. I hadn't eaten, so I had an emergency dinner next door: philly steak sandwich, sun chips, sweetened tea. Cab back to Hilton Garden Inn.