Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 of type Solo with write-up

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Friday 9th March 2012

• Teaching Touch: Tapworthy Touchscreen Design

  by Josh Clark

  Discover the rules of thumb for finger-friendly design. Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices—and even from the next version of Windows. Find out why those familiar desktop widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn to craft touchscreen interfaces that effortlessly teach users new gesture vocabularies. The challenge: gestures are invisible, without the visual cues offered by buttons and menus. As your touchscreen app sheds buttons, how do people figure out how to use the damn thing? Learn to lead your audience by the hand (and fingers) with practical techniques that make invisible gestures obvious. Designer Josh Clark (author of O'Reilly books "Tapworthy" and "Best iPhone Apps") mines a variety of surprising sources for interface inspiration and design patterns. Along the way, discover the subtle power of animation, why you should be playing lots more video games, and why a toddler is your best beta tester.

  Questions answered:
  1. How should UI layouts evolve to accommodate the ergonomics of fingers and thumbs?
  2. Why are buttons a hack? Why aren't they as effective as more direct touch gestures?
  3. How can users understand how to use apps that have no labeled menus or buttons?
  4. What's the proper role of skeuomorphic design (realistic 3D metaphors) in teaching touch?
  5. How can animation provide contextual help to teach gestures effortlessly? How does game design point the way here?

  • Gestures
  • iPad
  • Mobile UX
  • Touchscreen UI
  • User Experience

  At 3:30pm to 4:30pm, Friday 9th March

  In Ballroom A, Austin Convention Center

  Coverage write-up write-up audio clip note write-up

• A Crash Course in Becoming SuperBetter

  by Jane McGonigal

  In 2009, a mild traumatic brain injury changed the way that game designer Jane McGonigal thought about everything -- literally. She spent a year recovering -- struggling to think clearly, be physically active, and find a new sense of purpose. Her journey back to health led her to invent a new form of game design, aimed at having a measurable positive impact on players' real lives, and fused with scientific research at every level. In this talk, you'll see the first results of that process: a game called SuperBetter. You'll hear about the game's first clinical trials, and get a crash course in getting SuperBetter yourself: Find out how to turn weak social ties into allies. Learn how to experience "gain without pain" (or what scientists call "post-ecstatic growth"). Discover the secrets of "Lazy Exercise" and "Ninja Weight Loss". Find out what a two-minute "Future Boost" is, and why it's the most important thing you can do each week for your physical and mental health. From the mind of a game designer comes a radically disruptive model for integrating breakthrough science into our daily lives.

  • Health
  • Productivity

  At 5:00pm to 6:00pm, Friday 9th March

  In Exhibit Hall 5, Austin Convention Center

  Coverage write-up sketch note note audio clip

Saturday 10th March 2012

• Best Practices: Native + Web Hybrid Mobile Apps

  by Charles Ying

  Learn different ways to integrate HTML5 into native apps, what tools you can use, and when to build your own. We'll cover achieving high graphics frame rates, touch responsiveness while conserving battery life. Learn the benefits and tradeoffs of mobile graphics hardware acceleration in animation and emulating native UI in mobile web browsers. We'll also touch on Flipboard's use of HTML5.We'll cover these specific technology areas: WebKit and JavaScriptCore; native view system architecture, animated scene graphs; and hardware accelerated graphics drawing and compositing.

  • Best Practices
  • Mobile

  At 11:00am to 12:00pm, Saturday 10th March

  In Salon H, Hilton Austin Downtown

  Coverage audio clip audio clip slide deck write-up

• Startup Passion Smack-Down

  by John Bradberry

  A surprisingly high percentage of entrepreneurs derail their startups because they fall in love with their idea. Emotional attachment to an idea leads to premature scaling and a number of other dangers. But, passion is a sacred topic among founders, who are often just as passionate about their passion as about their startups. Too often, we entrepreneurs equate rigorous scrutiny of our ideas with “negative thinking.” In this workshop we will transcend the false dichotomy between "positive" and "negative" thinking, and explore how entrepreneurial passion can bring danger along with its obvious benefits. Drawing on the latest psychological and business research, we will show how to scrutinize and strengthen your startup idea in a way that deepens your passion and confidence, and elevates your odds of success.

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Ideas
  • Startups

  At 11:00am to 12:00pm, Saturday 10th March

  In Salon A, Hilton Austin Downtown

  Coverage write-up slide deck audio clip

• CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices

  by Andy Hume

  In the early days of CSS the web industry cut its teeth on blogs and small personal sites. Much of the methodology still considered best-practise today originated from the experiences of developers working alone, often on a single small style sheet, with few of the constraints that come from working with large distributed teams on large continually changing web projects.

  The mechanics of CSS are relatively simple. But creating large maintainable systems with it is still an unsolved problem. For larger sites, CSS is a difficult and complex component of the codebase to manage and maintain. It's difficult to document patterns, and it's difficult for developers unfamiliar with the code to contribute safely.

  How can we do better? What are the CSS best practises that are letting us down and that we must shake off? How can we take a more precise, structured, engineering-driven approach to writing CSS to keep it bug-free, performant, and most importantly, maintainable?

  • Best Practices
  • CSS

  At 3:30pm to 4:30pm, Saturday 10th March

  In Ballroom A, Austin Convention Center

  Coverage link note note write-up audio clip slide deck handout write-up video note note

Tuesday 13th March 2012

• Democracy 2.0 in the German Parliament

  by Jimmy Schulz

  Jimmy Schulz attended SXSW in 2011 and announced during the panel session „Make Citizens Social: Digital Participation in Public Services“ that next year he would report the results of the implementation of “Adhocracy” in the German parliament. The Inquiry Committee “Internet and digital society” has been experimenting with the application of Liquid Democracy ( www.demokratie.de ) this last year. New forms of democratic participation thanks to technical innovation can help reduce public dissatisfaction with politics. Significantly, these tools can improve transparency, which is important for political legitimization and helping people better understand and identify with political decisions. Jimmy Schulz would like to report on the initial results of the application of these tools in the German Parliament.

  • Democracy
  • Politics

  At 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Tuesday 13th March

  In Salon B, AT&T Conference Center

  Coverage audio clip write-up

• Surviving Lulz: Behind the Scenes of LulzSec

  by Matthew Prince

  On Thursday, June 2, 2011, LulzSecurity.com registered for CloudFlare — a service designed to make any website faster and more secure. One hour after they registered, they published 3.5 million usernames and passwords allegedly stolen from Sony Pictures' website.

  For the next three weeks, LulzSec claimed to hack organizations ranging from the CIA, to the US Senate, to the Arizona Immigration Police. In the meantime, law enforcement, cyber vigilantes, and rival hackers worked to unmask LulzSec and launch major attacks of their own to knock LulzSecurity.com offline. CloudFlare watched it all from the heart of the crossfire.

  We've received permission from LulzSec to tell exactly what it's like to be one of the most notorious hacking groups of all time and how to keep your site online when the whole world is trying to shut you down. This is the inside story.

  • Scaling
  • Security

  At 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Tuesday 13th March

  In Capitol E-H, Sheraton Austin Hotel at the Capitol

  Coverage audio clip write-up