Workshops

On Wednesday 15th of May we'll host two workshops:

• Designing for Touch by Josh Clark
• Mobile HTML5 by Max Firtman

The workshops will be held in Felix Meritis, start at 09:00 and end around 17:00. Lunch and drinks will be provided.

Designing for Touch by Josh Clark

Touchscreens are everywhere now, even the desktop, and this workshop tells you what you need to know to make the most of them. Fingers and thumbs turn desktop design conventions on their head, with the ergonomics of handheld devices demanding entirely new design patterns for both web and apps. Handheld touchscreen design introduces ergonomic concerns that are new to many digital designers; it’s no longer just how your pixels look but also how they feel. At the same time, touch gestures have the opportunity to sweep away away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices, but gesture design takes care and education. Find out how to do it the right way. This workshop takes a hands-on approach (ducks) to touchscreen design with practical guidelines, rich examples, exercises, and a bunch of new rules that bust the "settled" conventions of the desktop.

You'll learn:

• Layout and sizing guidelines for touchscreens on phones and tablets... and desktop, too.
• Emerging gesture conventions and design patterns for both apps and web
• How to make gestures discoverable by educating users with contextual cues
• Techniques for making touch interactions fast and efficient
• How to cope with the reduced real estate left in the wake of giant touch targets
• When the best touch UI is no touch at all; how to use sensors to speed or replace touch input
• Opportunities to push frontiers with entirely new interactions through touch

Attendees

Mobile HTML5 by Max Firtman

This workshop will give detailed information about the mobile browser ecosystem in 2013 and how to create successful mobile applications for the browser and for native and fullscreen apps, such as PhoneGap apps for store distribution, Chrome Apps and Firefox Open webapps.

We will cover

• Mobile browsers ecosystem today
• Browser vs. hybrid engines
• Well-known HTML5 APIs and how they work on mobile
• Pushing the limits on mobile: accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope access; performance timing, full-screen APIs, notification API, camera access, audio, battery and more.
• Dealing with proxy based browsers such as Amazon’s Silk browser on Kindle Fire.
• Migrating from desktop: background code, file apis, performance
• How to debug JavaScript on mobile browsers?
• What about JavaScript and power consumption?
• What is the compatibility on HTML5 APIs today in mobile browsers? How can we use feature detection and Progressive Enhancement for multi platform?
• What to expect in the near future?

The workshop will include labs that can be executed directly on mobile phones easily based on an online coding tool. Labs will include:

• Progressive Enhancement and feature detection
• Viewport and managing high resolution screens
• Hardware APIs
• Storage APIs and limits
• Touch, pointer and gesture events
• Best Practices

Besides testing on every attendee phone, we will have on stage several devices that will be used to make live tests, such as a BlackBerry 10, Firefox OS, Internet Explorer 10, Android and iOS.

Attendees