GIDS conference: My Experience

Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) was held on April 19 -22, 2011 at the green campus of IISc Bangalore. I attended the second day of conference, that was focused on Web trends and technologies. The sessions by Venkat and Harish were really good. The details of these and other sessions follow.

The conference began with “Building the next generation of experiences” by Arijit Chatterjee. Arijit is Engineering Manager for Platform Evangelism at Adobe Systems India. The trend of preferences for people is changing. Everyone wants to have better experiences, be it food, clothes or digital experiences. The experience has moved on from desktops, to laptops, to tablets and currently to smart phones. People want to have a meaningful, easy and engaging experience. There are essentially three areas of innovation in this:
1. Content authoring for the creators,
2. Customer experience management for businesses and
3. Online analytics and optimization to ensure the best value being delivered.

This session was followed by "Designing User Experiences for multi screen applications with Flash, HTML5 &CSS3" by Harish Sivaramakrishnan. Harish is a Platform Evangelist at Adobe Systems. He is also a UX design and usability expert. His talk highlighted the various devices available for communication, work etc today. The talk explored the possibility of designing the same user experience across all the different form factors i.e tablet, ipad, smart phones, desktop etc. Some practical ideas to be used by the developers to efficiently complete the coding , and the code that can be reused across all the different form factors, different screen resolutions using Adobe Flex, Flash, HTML 5 and CSS3. The programming tips and tricks were shared in these 3 platforms.

"HTML5 more than HTML5" was an interesting and thought provoking talk by Harish Vaidyanathan, who leads the evangelism efforts for Microsoft India. This session explored HTML5 and the session gave summary of HTML5 features. The session started with quick note of the logo design of HTML, and moved on to the features. Features include button curves, shadows, gradient can be done directly by coding. The button can have 4 different curve radii for 4 corners, button/ object can have shadow by placing lights .The best part is that while coding the screens can be checked by viewing in all the resolutions of different form factors. HTML5 combines the designer and developer skills and hence bridges the gap. Harish also gave aother session on "Unleashing a more beautiful web", some of the content was repetition of HTML and few features of IE 9.

"Towards a humane interface, aesthetic and usability" by Venkat Subramaniam. Venkat is the founder of Agile Developer,Inc. He has significant experience in design, architecture and development of software applications. The session gave an insight about usability in everyday interactions. Usability is more than just a “WOW” factor, it is more about making an application easier and intuitive to use. A successful application has to focus on three dimensions: business, design and usability. He gave few hilarious examples of User experience gone wrong in various products that he has come across. A spicejet check-in kiosk, Honda car to a programming language. The examples drawing to a very crucial point about Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS) rule. This was a fantastic simple session and will be sharing the presentation to MT UX community once i get my hands on it.

The conference gave insights on the changing technology and its usage. A better world of tomorrow for designers and developers .

Thanks Ankush for reviewing the draft.