Macadamian Blog
Interaction Design Association Opens an Ottawa Chapter
On May 9th, at Club Saw, Ottawa had its inaugural meeting of a local chapter of the Interaction Design Association (www.ixda.org). I am one of the 4 members of this new chapter’s organizing committee, along with Jed Looker, Samantha Lovelace and Cornelius Rachieru, and I am also proud to say that Macadamian was one of the event sponsors.
To be honest, we were optimistically hoping for 25-30 people to attend our first meeting, so we were thrilled when the first batch of 45 Eventbrite invitations were claimed within a couple of weeks of the event being announced. In the end, we almost reached the venue capacity with approximately 80 people, including the speakers in attendance.
Ottawa has a fairly diverse design community and since this was our first event, we weren’t sure how it should be structured, or what topics people would be interested in. So, after some discussion, we decided to take a broad approach, and instead of having just one speaker, we’d have 10-12, each talking for 5 minutes on the same topic.
When selecting speakers, we wanted to ensure we had a good cross-section so we included some from consultancies, others from in-house design teams, as well as designers involved in both the public and private sectors. The question we posed to all of them for their 5-minute talk was “What is your greatest design challenge?”
Once people started presenting, it quickly became clear that one of the greatest design challenges is to create a presentation that is only 5-minutes long. I was working during the event, so I didn't get to see all of the presentations, but of those I did see, here were my favourites:
How to Stay Up to Date with HTML5
The following is information we learned from Dan Menard (dan-menard.com ) when he gave us an internal presentation on HTML5. This is the third in a series.
In my last blog post I listed some helpful tools for HTML5 development. Since HTML5 is new and continues to evolve, I follow a number of blogs and thought leaders to keep track of everything that HTML5 has to offer.
What You Need to Know
I’ve found that there are really three things you need in order to stay on top of “all things HTML5.” These are:
1. In-depth information about the features you care about. If you’re working with scoped stylesheets, for example, you’ll want a go-to source for very specific information on scoped styles.
2. A high-level overview of progress and trends. This information will help you plan ahead for future projects and prepare for what is coming down the pipe.
3. A place to discuss what you’ve learned. Talking about a subject with other people always helps me to understand it better – whether that’s by asking questions or simply discussing what I know with others.
Look to Blogs for In-Depth Info
To find in-depth information, I find it helpful to follow a few blogs. Most browser vendors have excellent blogs that post really good technical details about the HTML5 features that they’re implementing. Here are a few that I like:
HTML5 Doctor is probably my favourite of the bunch – it’s updated about once a week and posts well-written, in-depth articles about a particular topic.