UW Web
Space shortcuts
Child pages
  • Web Council - May 24, 2012
Skip to end of metadata
Go to start of metadata
  • Agenda
    • Open Web Guy
    • UW Campus Directory Makeover
    • Law School Goes Mobile
  • Announcements
    • June 21 Meeting will be in Epidemiology Conference Room. Instructions how to find will be sent
  • Open Web Guy - Chris Wilson, Google Chrome Team
    • Chris Wilson's Timeline
      • cwilso@google.com or cwilso@gmail.com, http://cwilso.com
      • Been on the Web since 1993 at NCSA at Illinois; group he was in managed the supercomputers
      • Worked on an early version of PC-Telnet
      • Co-authored the first version of Mosaic
      • Moved to Seattle in 1994
      • Worked at Microsoft for 15 years; had something to do with every version of IE
      • Year and a half ago left Microsoft, went to Google,worked on Google TV, now working on Chrome team
    • My educational journey
      • Be passionate!
      • Started work on text terminals over 2400 baud modem. Current Wi-Fi connections are 6000 times faster
      • Seriously into playing games
        • Text games: Ulam, then NetHack
        • X-windows games; Nettrek, XTank
      • When World Wide Web and HTML arrived, co-wrote first version NCSA Mosaic
        • Took a lot of work to get it working
        • Had a tradition of shipping early and often; shipped 22 beta versions of Mosaic 1
          • Really excited that they got a thousand downloads
        • Got it done despite the fact that the Doom game came out in 1993
      • There was a lot of freedom at NCSA to build the right things to hack on
        • Did not need a business plan because they were making things better
        • Anytime you follow a path that lets you learn new things, it will lead you to creating greater things
          • Google has that same encouragement to go explore other stuff (self-driving cars, etc.)
      • Everyone is an author
        • The coolest thing about the Web was everyone could be an author
        • Basic Web was really basic; no CSS, no Javascript
        • Also, everyone should have a server on their machine
        • Network security was not on anyone's mind then
        • There was tons of wacky content on the Web in the early days
      • The Long Tail
        • Recognition that a significant portion of the content under a curve is out in the long tail; people are interested in the less prominent stuff; you can build a business selling rare items
        • Put up a Geocities site on how to build a DiggereeDo
          • Put his Microsoft email address on the page
          • 13 years later still get email thanking him for the instructions
          • Really rare interests can be connected on the Web
          • "The Web is a big room full of imaginary friends"; somebody out there shares your interests
          • The Web is driven by interactions between people
          • The Internet just enables human interactions to move faster, with fewer barriers and speed bumps in its way
            • Also removes social niceties, can get unpleasant
      • Most things come down to interactions between people
        • Whenever you are building anything, you need to obsessively think about the people who are going to be using it.
        • Mom was techy, but she did not sit down at her computer to tweak things; she wanted to do something
          • She was not turned on by angle brackets in HTML
          • Her end goal is people interactions
      • Focus on people, not technology
        • William Gibson, an author of the Cyberpunk genre, was not writing about technology; he was writing about people and how technology would affect people interactions
        • We have come from first cell phones to smartphones that can identify music, find our location, tell us what stars are overhead
        • We are creating better, easier to use experiences
        • Ben Galbraith "Web 2.0 is not a technology; it is about caring about the user experience when they use your site or application"
      • Never bet against Moore's Law
        • Have to think about what people will be using two years, five years from now
        • Learn music synthesis on a Moog Synthesizer that costs 10s of thousands of dollars. Now can download an app that does pretty much the same thing
        • Working on getting music and sound applications directly on the Web
      • The Web is everywhere
        • We use many devices to access the Web; desktop, smartphones, tablets; across many different operating systems
        • Kids learn from interactive applications; for them it is commonplace, it is how the world works; can do things you can't do in the real world
        • Making magic commonplace everywhere; autocomplete can be magical - guesses the things you can't remember
          • Compare that experience to using the old library card catalog
        • Trying to create that magic is what I am doing
      • Don't Stop Learning
        • Keep always trying to follow a thread you are interested in
        • "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be" - Douglas Adams
      • Discussion
        • What is your vision of where we will be in a year?
           
          • We will see an explosion in 3D
          • We will see powerful apps on the desktop
          • A lot of visual and aural enhancements to what we have now
        • TV - Used to work on "10 foot experience"; experiences you can control with your TV remote control from your lounge chair
          • More advanced controllers coming out; voice control, gestures, and touch
          • But what do people sit down in front of a TV for?
          • Google TV is a set-top box that runs Android; technical demands, such as very rapid encoding/decoding, were extreme
        • Video is huge - We are seeing better encoding and decoding techniques, and more of that is moving into the hardware
          • Licensing of the codec is a challenge
          • Video Rights Management (VRM) is also a challenge; no easy solution
        • Usability - Multifaceted thing
          • Depends on the type of thing you are building
          • When at Microsoft, did a ton of usability testing; broad spectrum of people used in tests
          • Google does usability testing as well
            • Google does a lot of platform stuff that users do not directly interact with (APIs)
            • Google's process is very iterative; release often
            • Try to do usability studies
            • Be willing to change what you create, even after you ship
    • People Directory - Chris Heiland
      • As part of the project updating the m.UW apps, have been working on improving the design of the People Directory
        • Needed something that works on every screen size, one design working on many platforms
      • Currently in development, scales nicely, gives good experience on mobiles, tablets, and mobiles; has UW theme
    • Mobile Lawyers - Kathy Keithly, Director, Information Systems, School of Law
      • School of Law site http://www.law.washington.edu/ now has a mobile version
         
      • Site autodetects smartphones and gives them a mobile mode (iPads get the full mode)
      • Have been thinking about mobile for some time
        • Objectives
          • Full site content available on mobile devices
        • Approach
          • Device detection
          • Page structure
          • mobile.css
          • use query string and cookie to set/get preferred view
        • Site Structure
          • Page store
          • Main master page
          • Mobile master page
          • HTTP handler with device database
        • Mobile master page is pretty much the same as main master page
          • Did not want to load up the top, use icons
          • Mobile styles override master styles
          • Mobile master page self-identifies
      • Style Guidelines/Changes
        • Multi-column layouts
          • Main site has multi-columns
          • In mobile, columns stack vertically
        • Tabbed views
          • Tabs were unordered lists
          • Going main to mobile was a challenge
        • Images
          • Bandwidth - did not worry much about it, uses smaller images in the mobile view
          • Scalability - Images over 200 pixels were a problem
          • Text flow - Some images placed in text flow were OK, others were too big; solution was to not show larger images in mobile view
        • Tables
          • Wide tables rendered small can result in columns not being visible
            • Ordered columns so that the important stuff is in the first columns
        • Layout
          • Most important content central/top
      • Overall experience - 2 months from start to finish
        • One person, with others providing input
        • Proof of concept - 1.5f weeks
        • Mobile master * stylesheet - 3 weeks
        • Style tweaks, testing & cleanup - 3 weeks
      • System of ASP.net; lightweight
  • No labels