DCamp Bangalore rocked again(part 2)

Contd from here

(I am sorry but I am really drowning in work right now Sad)

Ok after lunch it was time for another round of sessions. This time there were supposed to be some parallel session. This meant you win some, you loose some. But its fine with barcamps.

To make sure people are awake, alive and kicking, Anil, COO, Aditi Technologies, dumped his usual upper level management fundas and let loose a volley of Shayaris, with a twist. I sorry I dont recall any(Ya its been a long time too Happy)

Next in line was Aashish Solanki a.k.a. Net Bramha with an interesting topic, Art and Science of Web Design. It was more of discussion. Some interesting points were

  • Differentiate between structure and skin.
  • Something which is good for you might not be good for others. Getting their requirements is important.

An interesting comment from Aashish was "IE is the Labour Pain of Web Development". Why well, most of you time goes in checking if the page is rendered properly on IE 5.5, IE6 and IE7.

At the same time there was another talk of Google Applications on iPhone going on, which I did not attend. One reason being, I am no big fan of iPhone Blushing.

Next one was on Paper2.0 by Deepak Srinivasan(Beware its an IE only link). He had some interesting thoughts on what the next generation of paper should be like. I guess you can hit the link to read more. He has given it in a very interesting manner.

Murli next gave a talk on Memetic Engineering. I did not understand much of it and decided to move to the other talk which was going on, "Agile Designing" by Gilberto. It was interesting to see how Agile principles can be applied to Designing as well. I now believe that Agile processes can be used for almost every kind of development.

Next we had presentations from the DCamp Challenge finalists. It was interesting to see so many innovative ideas to save electricity being floated around. Most of them were restrictive but there was one team(I am sorry I dont remember the names) who had some amazing ideas to save energy without restrictions. I loved their idea of using speed breakers on the road to generate electricity. I am not sure if its feasible idea but none the less an interesting one.

Next Umesh Gopinath, talked about Mobile Web Experience. It was an interesting talk for me. He was very clear that Mobile web just cannot be the stripped down version of the classic web. Very true. Also most devices have limited memory and power so rendering  can be an issue. Also since phone is such a personal object, we can give a lot more personalised service than on a desktop. Which can be used innovatively. An example that he gave was that you could ask user to share link via SMS. This is something to be explored yet. I am yet get to know if he has uploaded his presentations somewhere. If I do get to know, I will surely update the links here.

Then we had the Sunny from Aditi Technologies giving a talk on how User Experience can be made better for anyone. He showed several examples like search results which have screenshots of the websites rather than some lines containing your keywords. He talked about how Citibank et.al. dont worry about customers experience or giving a better Web2.0 feel for the website. So showed some sites that they at Aditi had done. But then he made a mistake. He said that companies SAP and Oracle dont care about UX. They get UX guys near the end of the development cycle and at that moment, obviously the poor UX guy can do nothing much other than putting some paint. He actually said an interesting line, "You cannot put lipstick on a gorilla". Obviously any kind of painting is not going to ease of use of any application. A gentleman reacted sharply to it. He tried to justify the hopeless interfaces with 40+ entry boxes. Anyways things were cooled down and he continues to talk about how Aditi Technologies was making a difference.

Overall a great time there and some really good talk to learn from. Thanks Amit for organizing DCamp

 

If you have links to any of the presentations, please share in the comments or mail me Happy

Comments

Unknown said…
Saurabh can you please link my name to my design related blog http://whitespace.umeshgopinath.com. I will be posting the presentation there soon. Time is one constrain for me too.
September 17, 2008 4:45 PM
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