This was my fifth year in a row at SXSW Interactive. As usual very inspiring and educational. This year’s big trends seem to be HTML5/CSS3 and the evolution of online Groups. I bounced around this year to different topics, meeting people and writing down anything new and interesting. Here are my notes.
Dribbble – a show and tell for creatives. http://dribbble.com
Layer Tennis – Two competitors swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. http://www.layertennis.com
The creators of the W3C spec are eager to hear from the development community. They were calling out for our thoughts and ideas.
Several of the panelists were raving about the ebook HTML5 for Designers.
Treesaver.net – Let’s publishers design their page layouts in a magazine style that changes on the fly depending on the screen space available. All done with HTML5/CSS/Javascript.
Readability.com – This makes reading web articles much nicer to read by removing ads and page clutter. It allows you to mark articles to read later and pays the writers directly.
Flipboard – This is a ipad app that connects to your social network and favorite websites to bring you content based on you and your friend’s interests. It presents all content in it’s magazine style layout.
Deviant Art HTML5 Paint Tool – This was a so cool. I walked into the Deviant Art room, checked out some fresh art then sat down to try their new HTML5 paint tool. It’s a standard paint tool with brushes, colors, eraser, paint bucket and a marque tool. It even works with a Walcom tablet. Best part it was all HTML and Javascript so it works everywhere. Check it out http://muro.deviantart.com/.
5 Steps to Bulletproof UX Strategy by Robert Hoekman Jr – I really enjoyed this panel. Robert gave an overview of his user experience design fundamentals. They were #5 measure, #4 implement, #3 plan, #2 define the vision and #1 audit. You can here the panel here, http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5565.
Learnable.com – This new site from the popular Site Point guys is marketplace for people to learn and teach in niche areas. If you’re a subject matter expert, this site will allow you to make a course and sell it online. Similar to how iStockphoto introduced a crowd-source approach to stock photography, I haven’t see this done in the training realm yet so I’m interested to see how this works out.
Funny quote I over heard at SXSWi, “Big companies hire all the brightest minds and ignore all their ideas”.
Gary Vaynerchuk announced the end of Wine Library TV and the launch of his new project Daily Grape. It’s a website where he does his wine critiques GaryV style plus it’s an app where you can make notes about wine you want to remember to buy. It’s also designed to have more community involvement.
Cabana allows you to create your own iphone apps with a drag and drop interface and no programming requited.
AYTM, Ask Your Target Market is a market survey and research tool. Learn about your customized profile market with advanced tools at a cheap price. You create the surveys, pick out the type of person you want to take it and they will find them and deliver the survey results to you.
Grouped{in} was one of the big buzz logos you saw everywhere this year. Their service attempts to bring all your conversations on multiple platforms all in one place.
I found a couple of companies that allowed you to create an app with their software with no programming experience needed. GameSalad was focused on crating games for iOS. Conduit allowed your app to be published to many platforms and listed in many app networks. They are both free.