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The convergence of all things (wdu keynote)

by Chris Wilson on May 23, 2011

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Good morning, and Welcome to Seattle! \n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
First, I wanted to introduce myself - to prepare you a little bit with my background if we haven’t met.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV; but I’ve been at Google a short enough time that when I talk about Google, I still tend to do so in the third person. Although it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nI was going to size the icons here by length of time I spent at each place, but that was just depressing.\n\n
When John asked me to speak here, having previously spoken at other Web Directions events, I jumped at the chance to speak in my home town. Then I looked at the great list of other presenters speaking here over the next two daysand I got a little nervous. Particularly when John said, Yeah, we were wondering if you wanted to do the keynote. After hyperventilating in a paper bag for a few minutes, I started thinking about the Web, and where it’s been, and where I think, I hope that it’s going, and what I could possibly do to inform, entertain, and/or inspire you for the next fifty minutes or so - and I asked myself what could I do? \n And I thought, hey, I’ll steal. There are lots of great ideas currently zinging around the web development space, and not all their originators are at this conference. So I’m gonna steal ideas from those who aren’t here - and in fact, maybe I’ll even steal a few ideas from those who ARE here. [pause, drink] (actually, I’ll give credit, maybe it’s just borrowing.) \n
When John asked me to speak here, having previously spoken at other Web Directions events, I jumped at the chance to speak in my home town. Then I looked at the great list of other presenters speaking here over the next two daysand I got a little nervous. Particularly when John said, Yeah, we were wondering if you wanted to do the keynote. After hyperventilating in a paper bag for a few minutes, I started thinking about the Web, and where it’s been, and where I think, I hope that it’s going, and what I could possibly do to inform, entertain, and/or inspire you for the next fifty minutes or so - and I asked myself what could I do? \n And I thought, hey, I’ll steal. There are lots of great ideas currently zinging around the web development space, and not all their originators are at this conference. So I’m gonna steal ideas from those who aren’t here - and in fact, maybe I’ll even steal a few ideas from those who ARE here. [pause, drink] (actually, I’ll give credit, maybe it’s just borrowing.) \n
Really, I’m just hoping you mistake my naive incompetence for other peoples’ extraordinary genius. [take a drink, pause].\n
This talk comes at an interesting time for me - my role at google has been very interesting because I converted to living my computing life mostly through web applications. I converted from having a digital life on my computer to having a digital life nearly entirely on the web - my primary email interface is a web one, all my documents are web documents, spreadsheets, you name it. I use web-hosted services for pretty much everything, and don’t use much installed, native software. As obvious as this might be, this was somewhat groundbreaking to me. My setup for a new computer is near zero - I don’t have to copy files, or install software, or anything. I’d still prefer not to have my laptop destroyed in interesting ways like in the ChromeOS commercials, but still - I have two laptops at work - I rarely take either one home, because I can effectively work from anywhere. That works well for me, because I bike to work, and, well, I’m lazy. But my role at GoogleTV has given me a interesting perspective, as it's taken me on a journey of discovering the web through a whole new portal - the television - for context, my job is really about evangelizing building web applications for couch potatoes. So I’m here today to talk about the universal platform the web has become, and what we all need to focus on next. The reason for the title of my talk - convergence of all things - is because I see the web on its way to becoming what I always hoped it would; the convergent platform for computing.\n\n
I’m sure some of you remember this quote from Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape. This may seem like a cheap shot against Microsoft, and I really don’t intend it as such. Obviously, I didn’t believe Marc's statement then, as I continued to work for Microsoft for another 15 years; I don’t really believe it now, because I think they’re quite well-debugged device drivers. \n \n What I don’t think I expected, or realized, is that my expectations of what computing is would change so much. For context - Marc’s statement was made five years before the first iPod was released - before the mass adoption of MP3 music. Think of how much computation functionality has happened since then. Before Lightroom (by TEN YEARS!). Eights years before the Canon Digital Rebel (that’s right, at the time high-quality digital photos were hard to come by). I put up a page around this time on how to build bamboo didgeridoos, and I made ASCII art because I didn’t have a digital camera. If you asked me what I worry about backing up most today, I would say my photo library - 25,000 photos or so - and my music and movie library.\n \n
Don’t worry, my presentation today is not JUST a long stream of Douglas Adams quotes. Take bets now on how many there are, though. And how many LOLCATs.\n\nStill, this is amazingly true - anything invented before you’re born is simply the way the world works. I have a six year old daughter and a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and it’s amazing what they take for granted. The six year old regularly steals my iPad, and I will pick it up to find it running a talking fairy application rather than Angry Birds (which she knows as the “birdie game,” by the way.) She assumes she always has access to a huge library of Disney princess movies, at any given time.\n\nSo the challenge, for those of us who are over thirty-five, is to learn how to adapt -to figure out how to be amazed and excited by things that are against the natural order, and then go figure out how they occurred and how to further pervert the natural order in interesting ways.\n
Nowhere has this revolution moved faster than in mobile. Five years ago, when the iPhone was released, I had one of these. - a Samsung Blackjack, with a web browser and the ability to install native Windows CE apps; it automatically synced with my email, calendar and contacts in Exchange server over the air. It gave me access to the WSDOT Traffic map - for anyone who lives here and commutes over the 520 bridge, a Godsend. In fact, that feature alone was why I bought it. the iPhone didn't come out until a year later, in 2007. So why was the iPhone so ground breaking? \nIn short, because it enabled building responsive, engaging mobile experiences, because of all the amazing interactivity - Touch screen is amazingly engaging, Accelerometer as a real controller, and more. Oh yeah, and an app store that made it EASY to get new applications.\nFor context, at the time the iPhone was released, by the way, I was over thirty-five. This was against the natural order of things.\n
Nowhere has this revolution moved faster than in mobile. Five years ago, when the iPhone was released, I had one of these. - a Samsung Blackjack, with a web browser and the ability to install native Windows CE apps; it automatically synced with my email, calendar and contacts in Exchange server over the air. It gave me access to the WSDOT Traffic map - for anyone who lives here and commutes over the 520 bridge, a Godsend. In fact, that feature alone was why I bought it. the iPhone didn't come out until a year later, in 2007. So why was the iPhone so ground breaking? \nIn short, because it enabled building responsive, engaging mobile experiences, because of all the amazing interactivity - Touch screen is amazingly engaging, Accelerometer as a real controller, and more. Oh yeah, and an app store that made it EASY to get new applications.\nFor context, at the time the iPhone was released, by the way, I was over thirty-five. This was against the natural order of things.\n
Nowhere has this revolution moved faster than in mobile. Five years ago, when the iPhone was released, I had one of these. - a Samsung Blackjack, with a web browser and the ability to install native Windows CE apps; it automatically synced with my email, calendar and contacts in Exchange server over the air. It gave me access to the WSDOT Traffic map - for anyone who lives here and commutes over the 520 bridge, a Godsend. In fact, that feature alone was why I bought it. the iPhone didn't come out until a year later, in 2007. So why was the iPhone so ground breaking? \nIn short, because it enabled building responsive, engaging mobile experiences, because of all the amazing interactivity - Touch screen is amazingly engaging, Accelerometer as a real controller, and more. Oh yeah, and an app store that made it EASY to get new applications.\nFor context, at the time the iPhone was released, by the way, I was over thirty-five. This was against the natural order of things.\n
In ten years, I went from this ...\n
to being able to hold my cell phone up in the air and have it tell me what music is playing, having the entire world map in my hand, having my phone show me a map of the stars and planets I’m looking at, which meant I could actually tell my daughter real constellation names instead of making them up - “the princess”, “the donkey” - in short, having endless entertainment and connection. The bar hasn’t just been raised; it’s on a whole different scale. A logarithmic one, I believe.\n
And of course, the iPhone raised the bar across the board for mobile platforms. In fact, for me personally, after I’d acquired an iPhone, and Microsoft was trying to figure out what its mobile story was after Mobile 5, I recall making this skeptical statement to a friend - I had a guitar in my office, and I used my iPhone as my guitar tuner. This quickly became a critical feature for me - I didn’t want to have to keep another guitar tuner around. In short, I was saying Windows Mobile’s future success rested on the number and quality of apps in its app store.So a few months ago, I decided I really needed to update my mobile phone from my 2.5yr old iphone 3G. I KNOW, what a relic! What can I say, I’m cheap. So I was at Google, and I got a Nexus S; and I managed to wrangle a Windows Phone 7 from a Microsoft friend. I’m happy to report all three of these devices had guitar tuner apps; and honestly, there weren’t a whole lot of native apps other than that that I cared about, because they all had good integration with the web services I use (although I think Win Phone 7 has some work to do with Twitter).Ultimately, my choice of which phone to stick with came down to one factor, and only one - can you guess what it was? Battery life.\n
And of course, the iPhone raised the bar across the board for mobile platforms. In fact, for me personally, after I’d acquired an iPhone, and Microsoft was trying to figure out what its mobile story was after Mobile 5, I recall making this skeptical statement to a friend - I had a guitar in my office, and I used my iPhone as my guitar tuner. This quickly became a critical feature for me - I didn’t want to have to keep another guitar tuner around. In short, I was saying Windows Mobile’s future success rested on the number and quality of apps in its app store.So a few months ago, I decided I really needed to update my mobile phone from my 2.5yr old iphone 3G. I KNOW, what a relic! What can I say, I’m cheap. So I was at Google, and I got a Nexus S; and I managed to wrangle a Windows Phone 7 from a Microsoft friend. I’m happy to report all three of these devices had guitar tuner apps; and honestly, there weren’t a whole lot of native apps other than that that I cared about, because they all had good integration with the web services I use (although I think Win Phone 7 has some work to do with Twitter).Ultimately, my choice of which phone to stick with came down to one factor, and only one - can you guess what it was? Battery life.\n
But at that point, I WAS already a passionate and long-time advocate of the web platform. So with the vast use of the iPhone’s web connection, why didn’t the iPhone’s popularity cause a revolution in the mobile web platform? Native apps on the iPhone exploded, of course, but as someone who bought an iPod touch just to carry the web around my house in the palm of my hand, I was clearly an outlier. \nWell, none of the cool stuff was there in the web platform on the iPhone. No accelerometer, geolocation, audio input, even touch input. And the Javascript engine was not as fast as native code, by a long shot.\nFinally, there was no app store. How do you discover the “Top 25”? “Trending”? I’ve seriously lost count of how much money I’ve spent in the Apple app store. 99¢? Hell yeah! I spent four times that on my latte this morning!But with all these pieces missing, it kinda tanked having dynamic maps, the star map, and the music identification app, and the guitar tuner. I can’t completely blame Apple here - after all, there were no standards for these things at the time, of course - and it has worked out quite well for them. But today, we’re poised on the verge of that all changing.\n
But at that point, I WAS already a passionate and long-time advocate of the web platform. So with the vast use of the iPhone’s web connection, why didn’t the iPhone’s popularity cause a revolution in the mobile web platform? Native apps on the iPhone exploded, of course, but as someone who bought an iPod touch just to carry the web around my house in the palm of my hand, I was clearly an outlier. \nWell, none of the cool stuff was there in the web platform on the iPhone. No accelerometer, geolocation, audio input, even touch input. And the Javascript engine was not as fast as native code, by a long shot.\nFinally, there was no app store. How do you discover the “Top 25”? “Trending”? I’ve seriously lost count of how much money I’ve spent in the Apple app store. 99¢? Hell yeah! I spent four times that on my latte this morning!But with all these pieces missing, it kinda tanked having dynamic maps, the star map, and the music identification app, and the guitar tuner. I can’t completely blame Apple here - after all, there were no standards for these things at the time, of course - and it has worked out quite well for them. But today, we’re poised on the verge of that all changing.\n
In fact, I’m happy to report there is a guitar tuner in the Chrome Web Store - so the web can be my guitar tuner too! No, I’m not a salesdroid for Chrome or the Chrome Web Store - I’m just happy the web platform is getting these apps too - because I want my opinion of its chances to be higher than my opinion of Windows Mobile a couple years ago. Now I’m kind of cheating here, because this particular app uses Flash for the audio input - but only because the audio apis are currently still under a flag. Soon, my pet, soon.\n
One big reason I’m convinced the web platform will succeed as the universal platform is that access to capabilities in the web platform is catching up. We have storage, file system, geolocation, a variety of sensor apis, 2D and 3D graphics, touch events... and promotion as first-class applications in several different web browsers. In fact, Chrome’s “Create Application Shortcut” is why I installed Chrome almost immediately after they shipped their first public release, and had it on pretty much every machine I owned from then on. I wanted a Gmail icon on my desktop.I’ll take a stand here too - I hope the concept of App Stores will take off on the Web, too. Not as a way of limiting users to one browser, OS or source of applications - but as the app equivalent of a trusted storefront promoting multiple vendors’ products. It could happen, right? Hope springs eternal. Look at me - I’ve lived in Seattle for the past sixteen years, and for pretty much all that time I’ve owned a convertible.\n
One big reason I’m convinced the web platform will succeed as the universal platform is that access to capabilities in the web platform is catching up. We have storage, file system, geolocation, a variety of sensor apis, 2D and 3D graphics, touch events... and promotion as first-class applications in several different web browsers. In fact, Chrome’s “Create Application Shortcut” is why I installed Chrome almost immediately after they shipped their first public release, and had it on pretty much every machine I owned from then on. I wanted a Gmail icon on my desktop.I’ll take a stand here too - I hope the concept of App Stores will take off on the Web, too. Not as a way of limiting users to one browser, OS or source of applications - but as the app equivalent of a trusted storefront promoting multiple vendors’ products. It could happen, right? Hope springs eternal. Look at me - I’ve lived in Seattle for the past sixteen years, and for pretty much all that time I’ve owned a convertible.\n
One big reason I’m convinced the web platform will succeed as the universal platform is that access to capabilities in the web platform is catching up. We have storage, file system, geolocation, a variety of sensor apis, 2D and 3D graphics, touch events... and promotion as first-class applications in several different web browsers. In fact, Chrome’s “Create Application Shortcut” is why I installed Chrome almost immediately after they shipped their first public release, and had it on pretty much every machine I owned from then on. I wanted a Gmail icon on my desktop.I’ll take a stand here too - I hope the concept of App Stores will take off on the Web, too. Not as a way of limiting users to one browser, OS or source of applications - but as the app equivalent of a trusted storefront promoting multiple vendors’ products. It could happen, right? Hope springs eternal. Look at me - I’ve lived in Seattle for the past sixteen years, and for pretty much all that time I’ve owned a convertible.\n
One big reason I’m convinced the web platform will succeed as the universal platform is that access to capabilities in the web platform is catching up. We have storage, file system, geolocation, a variety of sensor apis, 2D and 3D graphics, touch events... and promotion as first-class applications in several different web browsers. In fact, Chrome’s “Create Application Shortcut” is why I installed Chrome almost immediately after they shipped their first public release, and had it on pretty much every machine I owned from then on. I wanted a Gmail icon on my desktop.I’ll take a stand here too - I hope the concept of App Stores will take off on the Web, too. Not as a way of limiting users to one browser, OS or source of applications - but as the app equivalent of a trusted storefront promoting multiple vendors’ products. It could happen, right? Hope springs eternal. Look at me - I’ve lived in Seattle for the past sixteen years, and for pretty much all that time I’ve owned a convertible.\n
One big reason I’m convinced the web platform will succeed as the universal platform is that access to capabilities in the web platform is catching up. We have storage, file system, geolocation, a variety of sensor apis, 2D and 3D graphics, touch events... and promotion as first-class applications in several different web browsers. In fact, Chrome’s “Create Application Shortcut” is why I installed Chrome almost immediately after they shipped their first public release, and had it on pretty much every machine I owned from then on. I wanted a Gmail icon on my desktop.I’ll take a stand here too - I hope the concept of App Stores will take off on the Web, too. Not as a way of limiting users to one browser, OS or source of applications - but as the app equivalent of a trusted storefront promoting multiple vendors’ products. It could happen, right? Hope springs eternal. Look at me - I’ve lived in Seattle for the past sixteen years, and for pretty much all that time I’ve owned a convertible.\n
So to be fair, I should say what “Native” apps do I still use - Lightroom and Photoshop, of course, and Eclipse; iTunes, although after this week’s announcement of Google Music I can start working on getting rid of that one; tweetdeck (because it has a better large-screen experience), and Keynote - also because of experience. More on that shortly.\n
Why are these still native apps for me? Well, for some of them, it’s because Native platforms can innovate faster, and optimize for particular hardware better. That’s a weakness as well as a strength, though - Native platforms can innovate faster because they limit options, and are frequently awful at being adaptive - they optimize for a minimal scenario/device. For example, one of my daughter’s OSX games pops this dialog every time I run it. For context, this is on a 2560x1440 27” iMac. In short, no, please do not change the video mode to 640x480. I also don’t want to have to buy new copies of apps when the screen sizes changes (like I did when I bought an iPad), or if I get a device with a different processor.\n\n
Why are these still native apps for me? Well, for some of them, it’s because Native platforms can innovate faster, and optimize for particular hardware better. That’s a weakness as well as a strength, though - Native platforms can innovate faster because they limit options, and are frequently awful at being adaptive - they optimize for a minimal scenario/device. For example, one of my daughter’s OSX games pops this dialog every time I run it. For context, this is on a 2560x1440 27” iMac. In short, no, please do not change the video mode to 640x480. I also don’t want to have to buy new copies of apps when the screen sizes changes (like I did when I bought an iPad), or if I get a device with a different processor.\n\n
Why are these still native apps for me? Well, for some of them, it’s because Native platforms can innovate faster, and optimize for particular hardware better. That’s a weakness as well as a strength, though - Native platforms can innovate faster because they limit options, and are frequently awful at being adaptive - they optimize for a minimal scenario/device. For example, one of my daughter’s OSX games pops this dialog every time I run it. For context, this is on a 2560x1440 27” iMac. In short, no, please do not change the video mode to 640x480. I also don’t want to have to buy new copies of apps when the screen sizes changes (like I did when I bought an iPad), or if I get a device with a different processor.\n\n
And fundamentally, the power of the web platform is that it goes across all these devices and more - of all the devices I own shown here, no more than two of them run the same operating system. The web, though, works well on all of them. This is a big benefit in giving me access anywhere - not having to drag my laptop everywhere. in fact, this was my somewhat naive reason for immediately buying an ipod touch when they first became available - because I could walk around my house and have the web in the palm of my hand. This is why I was so excited that Google actually announced the Music beta earlier this week, because I find the idea of not having to plug devices in to sync most compelling. One thing that almost tipped me on to an Android phone was the availability of an over-the-air syncing system to sync with my itunes library. Of course, offline access does matter, and there’s still some work to be done there, but it’s underway.Having one platform that bridges and connects environments/devices, with implementations that are tailored to those various environments/devices, is really quite powerful. In the end, all I care about then is how I experience my services on a given device. The really cool thing is that the Web is truly starting to be the common platform - not just the common denominator platform.\n
That’s also why I’ve been really excited to be part of the Google TV project - because the idea of pushing the web platform as the interactive platform for TV is very compelling. After all, TVs are more common than computers or mobile devices - 80% for computers, 90% for mobile - and are used more than both of those put together. Television is the next big space for the web platform. There, I did my corporate service announcement, so I can expense my parking, I’m done.\n
I mean, I basically just said the web platform, in my opinion, ultimately will win, right? So I’m only twenty minutes in, we can all break early and go get another cup of coffee, right?\n [pause, drink]\nin a word, the problem is... experience.\n
To illustrate - why is this presentation in Keynote? Because the experience of building a slide deck with the web sucks. I don’t want to author my deck in a text editor - let alone hand-write all my slide builds in CSS transitions. I’m lazy - I don’t want to hand-edit the CSS in Eclipse when I could drag and get alignment lines in Keynote. We should be enabling people to be lazy on the web, too. And I haven’t seen a good presentation web app experience. Granted, my bar is fairly high; it also has to intelligently handle multi-screen with presenter notes, going full-screen, AND have a great outlining and authoring experience. It turns out, building scalable, flexible experiences that delight users across devices is hard.\n
Now, that isn’t to say ALL web experiences still suck - I’m seeing amazing applications come out on the web over the last year - and I think 3D support and audio and touch apis are going to make an incredible difference. I’m going to blur the line between web applications and content, because I think it deserves to be blurred. When I mention incredible apps, it’s because I think it shows the incredible capability of the web platform - and the . I am not a designer - anyone who’s seen my blog can tell you that - but I do recognize that great experiences require great tools, whether they are paragraph-level typographic tools, or hardware-access apis.\nI do want to say, I’m intentionally blurring the line between content and applications in this talk, because I think they are both experiences, and they both deserve to be treated as such... Although I love the semantic content on Wikipedia, for example, and could easily spend hours diving into random articles, ...\n
the experience would probably be a little destroyed for me if it were using Comic Sans. Content - or more precisely, the careful typographic and visual layout of textual content - has been a passion of mine for over a decade. Don’t think if I use lots of application-heavy examples that I think text, content layout or text-oriented content is unimportant; it’s just that they are similar challenges to me: How to make scalable, flexible experiences...\n
...that don’t suck. For the remaining (n) minutes, I hope to spark your passion for making experiences that don’t suck - to recognize that the Web applies across devices and scenarios, in a way that no other platform does, and it’s your responsibility to consider how your applications, content, and sites work across that spectrum.\n\nSo what does “don’t suck” mean? Well, much like obscenity, I’ll know it when I see it - but I think we can use some guardrails.\n
For example, let’s cast our minds back eleven years, to John Allsop’s seminal “Dao of Web Design” article on A List Apart. In it, with much foresight he said this - now is the time for the web to outgrow its origins in the printed page. I agree with this strongly, although I would say the goal is to grow beyond the constraints of previous media. John also said, “This is not to say we should abandon the wisdom of hundreds of years of printing and thousands of years of writing. But we need to understand which of these lessons are appropriate for the web, and which are mere rituals.” With that in mind, I wanted to mention...\n
...some seminal research on reading done by a former Microsoft colleague, and very good friend of mine, Bill Hill, that opened my eyes to the wisdom of books and printing. Bill did a bunch of research in the late 90s about how people read - some of this research was what sparked the development of ClearType at Microsoft, and some of it went into a research paper entitled “the Magic of Reading”. You can find this on the web, and I highly recommend it - many facts such as why books are the size they are have reasons behind them. Part of the “wisdom of books” comes from thousands of years of determining what is “a convenient/readable format” - Now convenience comes in multiple form factors, of course, but it’s worth understanding what makes content more readable - although much of this is about “long-form reading,” there are concepts that benefit all content presentation. It’s worth a read.\n\n\n
This statement by Ben Galbraith was one of the best summaries of the changing focus of the web in the mid-2000s. I think everyone should care - and care deeply - about their user’s experience.\nNow, John also said “It sounds an impossibility, designing the universal page.” - and you should “Think about what your pages do, not what they look like.”\n
Fast-forward to last year. We actually have mobile browsing growing at a fast rate, particularly if you start including tablets - and building these flexible pages is important. The need to marry caring about your user experience with the growing explosion of different scenarios and devices used on the web is becoming too strong to ignore.\n\nAnd Ethan Marcotte wrote a seminal article describing “Responsive Web Design,” which he described as consisting of three main technical ingredients - fluid grids (that is, a flexible layout), flexible images (or, enabling different resolutions of image for different devices, since it’s silly to push all the pixels my large-screen desktop needs to look good at my cell phone), and finally, media queries to help decide when to use what. This requires, as Ethan put it, a different way of thinking - you need to optimize your design for multiple different viewing contexts, while understanding that stress points will appear.\n
Fast-forward to last year. We actually have mobile browsing growing at a fast rate, particularly if you start including tablets - and building these flexible pages is important. The need to marry caring about your user experience with the growing explosion of different scenarios and devices used on the web is becoming too strong to ignore.\n\nAnd Ethan Marcotte wrote a seminal article describing “Responsive Web Design,” which he described as consisting of three main technical ingredients - fluid grids (that is, a flexible layout), flexible images (or, enabling different resolutions of image for different devices, since it’s silly to push all the pixels my large-screen desktop needs to look good at my cell phone), and finally, media queries to help decide when to use what. This requires, as Ethan put it, a different way of thinking - you need to optimize your design for multiple different viewing contexts, while understanding that stress points will appear.\n
Fast-forward to last year. We actually have mobile browsing growing at a fast rate, particularly if you start including tablets - and building these flexible pages is important. The need to marry caring about your user experience with the growing explosion of different scenarios and devices used on the web is becoming too strong to ignore.\n\nAnd Ethan Marcotte wrote a seminal article describing “Responsive Web Design,” which he described as consisting of three main technical ingredients - fluid grids (that is, a flexible layout), flexible images (or, enabling different resolutions of image for different devices, since it’s silly to push all the pixels my large-screen desktop needs to look good at my cell phone), and finally, media queries to help decide when to use what. This requires, as Ethan put it, a different way of thinking - you need to optimize your design for multiple different viewing contexts, while understanding that stress points will appear.\n
As Jeremy Keith said, you need to think in proportions rather than pixels - building from PSDs is no longer appropriate. In short, \n
you have to let go of pixel-precision.\n
I tend to think of this as “responsible web design” rather than just responsive web design. But in order to really take this seriously, you need to rid yourself of the idea that my desktop (or laptop) computer is somehow more important when accessing web applications or sites - in reality, I’m almost as likely to be using my handheld, my tablet, or my TV. I’ve used the Internet Movie Database site from all of these devices. “desktop plus mobile” is not really a solution anymore either. You have to think of the spectrum of experiences.\n\nNow, the exciting thing here is that these ideas have been around for quite a while. But they’re starting to be necessary - because of the explosion of devices and form factors used to access the web.\n\nSo all you have to do to make this happen, is...\n
build and test everywhere! [pause, drink]\nOK, maybe not. But you should build for a spectrum of environments, and be sure to test across many. Dann’s talk tomorrow on building 10-ft user interfaces will show some of the challenges just of doing that for TV.\nAnd of course, you should plan for inflection points - or target environments where you want to be sure the experience is great. The media queries site is an interesting resource to see how some designs work across different environments - although I wish they would put more emphasis on scaling up, beyond 1200 pixels. Probably just because I have a big monitor. :)\n
build and test everywhere! [pause, drink]\nOK, maybe not. But you should build for a spectrum of environments, and be sure to test across many. Dann’s talk tomorrow on building 10-ft user interfaces will show some of the challenges just of doing that for TV.\nAnd of course, you should plan for inflection points - or target environments where you want to be sure the experience is great. The media queries site is an interesting resource to see how some designs work across different environments - although I wish they would put more emphasis on scaling up, beyond 1200 pixels. Probably just because I have a big monitor. :)\n
build and test everywhere! [pause, drink]\nOK, maybe not. But you should build for a spectrum of environments, and be sure to test across many. Dann’s talk tomorrow on building 10-ft user interfaces will show some of the challenges just of doing that for TV.\nAnd of course, you should plan for inflection points - or target environments where you want to be sure the experience is great. The media queries site is an interesting resource to see how some designs work across different environments - although I wish they would put more emphasis on scaling up, beyond 1200 pixels. Probably just because I have a big monitor. :)\n
build and test everywhere! [pause, drink]\nOK, maybe not. But you should build for a spectrum of environments, and be sure to test across many. Dann’s talk tomorrow on building 10-ft user interfaces will show some of the challenges just of doing that for TV.\nAnd of course, you should plan for inflection points - or target environments where you want to be sure the experience is great. The media queries site is an interesting resource to see how some designs work across different environments - although I wish they would put more emphasis on scaling up, beyond 1200 pixels. Probably just because I have a big monitor. :)\n
I’ve learned a ton about what can make a compelling desktop web application from my experience with TV. Scrolling on TV completely breaks the experience - and it turns out, the less I have to blindly scroll on the desktop, the happier I am, also. Even WITH my Magic Mouse. I used one example in my Google I/O talk yesterday - the Huffington Post, because I quite like their NewsGlide application. However, if you go to Huffingtonpost.com, it is a HUGE scrolling page - it’s like laying the first 5 or 6 pages of the newspaper out end-to-end, top-to-bottom, and walking backwards down it while reading. NewsGlide, by contrast, does a much better job of categorizing and letting you dive in where you might be interested. I’m starting to find that I prefer the “TV-optimized” versions of several sites, even when I’m not using a TV - if only because they’ve thought about a holistic experience.\nSo I encourage you to try a thought experiment. Try building a “mobile” or a “TV-optimized” web app, and see how it works on desktop. See what you learn about building an engaging experience. Think through the ideal experience on each device, and see how the commonalities might work together. Going to Wikipedia on a TV browser right now isn’t a great experience - but Wikipedia’s mobile design is actually quite thoughtful, and some of those lessons would carry across to scenarios like TV (e.g. expanding content, minimal front page).\nSometimes apps just aren’t a good fit in a scenario - for example, I’ve tried to envision Angry Birds on TV, but with a directional pad controller only it’s like Centipede without the trackball. that’s okay, if it’s a considered opinion.\n
And we should all be pushing the platform forward, and pointing out the holes that need filling - if you can’t build what you want to build, because the web can’t do that yet, get involved. Don’t be dogmatic, or religious, and don’t be a browser fanboy - of ANY browser - be pragmatic and profit-motivated in your arguments. Greed is good. I know, and I don’t even work for Microsoft anymore!But from my experience in IE, web developers and designers were not great about clearly articulating what features they needed - or more particularly, WHY they needed those features. It can be hard to estimate the demand when the reasoning is just “because it would be cool,” rather than “because I want to build an application that uses a 3D canvas to build a virtual fishtank world.” or “because I want to build an image processing program and media library web app that needs to perform Javascript image filtering on 20-megapixel images efficiently.”I’d also encourage you to think through your own scenarios of when you use native applications, and why, and how you think those applications could get built as web apps in the future. What’s missing?\n\n
And we should all be pushing the platform forward, and pointing out the holes that need filling - if you can’t build what you want to build, because the web can’t do that yet, get involved. Don’t be dogmatic, or religious, and don’t be a browser fanboy - of ANY browser - be pragmatic and profit-motivated in your arguments. Greed is good. I know, and I don’t even work for Microsoft anymore!But from my experience in IE, web developers and designers were not great about clearly articulating what features they needed - or more particularly, WHY they needed those features. It can be hard to estimate the demand when the reasoning is just “because it would be cool,” rather than “because I want to build an application that uses a 3D canvas to build a virtual fishtank world.” or “because I want to build an image processing program and media library web app that needs to perform Javascript image filtering on 20-megapixel images efficiently.”I’d also encourage you to think through your own scenarios of when you use native applications, and why, and how you think those applications could get built as web apps in the future. What’s missing?\n\n
And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
With that, I think there might be time for just a few questions...\n
\n
The one place where I am a designer - perhaps not a good one, but a designer nonetheless - is in building slide decks. I’m a detail fanatic, and cannot stand having hanging words, or poor slide layout, or inappropriate amounts of content on a slide. But while building a deck, I have to choke that down, reminding myself that I need to focus on the story I’m trying to tell, and to leave the details of what it looks like on screen until later - when I know whether I’m presenting in 4:3 or 16:9 format, for example.\n
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The convergence of all things (wdu keynote) — Presentation Transcript

The Convergence of All Things Chris Wilson#webdir @cwilso
Who am I?
Who am I?
Who am I?
Who am I? ( )
What am I doing up here, anyway?
What am I doing up here, anyway? IM IN UR WEB STEALIN UR IDEAS
He attacked everything in life with a mix ofextraordinary genius and naive incompetence,and it was often difficult to tell which waswhich.-Douglas Adams
Livin’ la vida Web
The Web as universal platform“ [Netscape will] reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.” -Marc Andreessen, 1995
The natural order of things Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. -Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
The glorious mobile revolution of the 2000s
The glorious mobile revolution of the 2000s
The glorious mobile revolution of the 2000s
The glorious mobile revolution of the 2000s • Responsive, engaging experiences • Sensors! • App Store
Choosing A Mobile Device
Choosing A Mobile Device “My cell phone now has to be my guitar tuner.” -me, 2009
Choosing A Mobile Device “My cell phone now has to be my guitar tuner.” -me, 2009
Why didn’t the iPhone = mobile Web explosion?
Why didn’t the iPhone = mobile Web explosion?•None of that cool stuff was exposed in the web platform •No accelerometer, geolocation, audio input, touch events, ... and a slow JavaScript engine!
Why didn’t the iPhone = mobile Web explosion?•None of that cool stuff was exposed in the web platform •No accelerometer, geolocation, audio input, touch events, ... and a slow JavaScript engine!•No app store!
Meeting the bar
Why the Web platform is poised to further explode
Why the Web platform is poised to further explode•Access to capabilities in the Web is catching up •storage, geolocation, integration into “native OS”, sensor connections, 2D/3D graphics, touch, ...
Why the Web platform is poised to further explode•Access to capabilities in the Web is catching up •storage, geolocation, integration into “native OS”, sensor connections, 2D/3D graphics, touch, ...•Of course, my dive computer is still an outlier.
Why the Web platform is poised to further explode•Access to capabilities in the Web is catching up •storage, geolocation, integration into “native OS”, sensor connections, 2D/3D graphics, touch, ...•Of course, my dive computer is still an outlier.•Still need app stores, though.
The Web is everywhere I don’t want to carry around my digital life - I want my digital life available, anywhere
Yes, even on TV.
So what’s the problem?
Web Experiences (mostly) still suck.
Not everything sucks.
Make experiences that don’t suck.
“Now is the time for the medium of the web tooutgrow its origins in the printed page. Not toabandon so much wisdom and experience, but toalso chart its own course, where appropriate.”- John Allsopp, “A Dao of Web Design” - 2000
Bill Hill’s “The Magic of Reading” - 1999A book is a...“300-page waterslide for humanattention” - Bill Hill
Build Experiences, not Apps or Sites “Web 2.0 isn’t a set of technologies - it’s caring about your user experience.” -Ben Galbraith, 2006
Responsive Web Design - Ethan Marcotte, 2010
Responsive Web Design - Ethan Marcotte, 2010 •Fluid grids
Responsive Web Design - Ethan Marcotte, 2010 •Fluid grids •Flexible images
Responsive Web Design - Ethan Marcotte, 2010 •Fluid grids •Flexible images •Media queries
A Different Mindset “[Think] in proportions rather than pixels” -Jeremy Keith
Let go of pixel-precision.
How to be a Responsible Web Designer
How to be a Responsible Web Designer Rid yourself of the idea that the desktop computer is my central web connection device.
Build and Test Everywhere!
Build and Test Everywhere!•Okay, maybe that’s not realistic.•But you should test in multiple environments (as well as browsers)
Build and Test Everywhere!•Okay, maybe that’s not realistic.•But you should test in multiple environments (as well as browsers)•Plan for inflection points- common scenarios http://mediaqueri.es/
Learn the Lessons from Each Scenario
Demand More
Demand More•If the Web platform can’t do what you want yet, get pushy.
Push the limits.
Push the limits.
Push the limits.
Push the limits.
Push the limits.
Push the limits.
Fin I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. -Douglas Adamscwilso@[google.com|gmail.com]@cwilsocwilso.com

The convergence of all things (wdu keynote)

by Chris Wilson on May 23, 2011

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The convergence of all things (wdu keynote) — Presentation Transcript