Thursday and Friday morning is mostly workshops to attend, they cost extra, so I didn’t attend any. I planned a photo expedition in the city with other photo nerds attending, but apparently 10am is too early for IxD photo nerds. No one else showed. Bums! I went out anyway on my own, and only shot feet! I’m a little dissappointed with Vancouver feet. Though boots are quite popular here, I didn’t see too many that were photo-worthy. When I “track shot” one pair through a cross-walk, walking towards me, she stopped and told me that I was the second person to take photos of her feet that morning! Who else out there is shooting feet!!?? Show yourself!

The afternoon of the conference was the official start of the conference. It included a couple keynotes and a panel discussion.

Keynote #1: John Thackara
I had high hopes for this guy, from a classmate’s strong recommendation. I’m sorry, it was disappointing. He presented some nice ideas about “Experiencing Sustainability” but failed to bring it back to the conference and relate it more closely to us. Interesting points he said:

• A mobile handset that weighs 0.2kg, gives a 500kg environmental impact to the world.
• 20% of the ecological impact from a city comes from moving water.
• landshare.net
• rainwaterhog.com
• Dry flush toilets
• fairtracing.org

Panel: Jared Spool and Friends
Panel discussion about IxD education. He proposed, if the Fortune 2000 companies each spent 2.5 million dollars on user experience, we would need 10,000 more Interaction Designers! How are we going to support this demand? The panel included a guy from SAP, LiquidNet, Involution, Frog, School of Visual Arts, and RMIT (Australian University).

This panel was (mostly) a blatant and obscene display of ego. Topics included…

• Ffighting over IxD versus UX and which group knows how to design.
• If you can’t draw/sketch your ideas… you can’t design!
• ACID is an acronym with nested acronyms

Keynote #2: Fiona Raby
Fiona is a founding member of the CRD Research Studio at the Royal College of Art (UK?). Fiona’s presentation was plagued with technical difficulties, but she has (almost) no one to blame but herself. The audio/visual guys did not have a stereo plug to connect her laptop to the sound system, but the other issues were her own fault. She used someone else’s laptop, for some reason. This presentation was the first time that she used Keynote, which was also a bad move.

Her entire presentation was a compilation of class projects her classes have done at the RCA. Though they were interesting projects, mostly, they did lack relevence to the conference. All of the projects were critical designs, and I honestly do not remember any of them because it was so boring and irrelevent. I have no problems with presenting critical design, but you have to have a message and relate that message to your audience. I felt like I was in 2nd grade Show and Tell. You have 450 people staring at you on stage, please, have a message!

Reception
After the final keynote, I went shoe shopping with my friend Angel, in the mall underneath the hotel. No luck finding anything. I took a small siesta after that, and then came back to the Ballroom for a reception. Spent time talking with some great new friends from Israel and Norway! Had an early night because of all the sessions today… but look out tonight! Saturday is party night!

Demo from Adobe on Fireworks (FW) CS4, on how to use it for rapid “click-through” prototyping.

First half of the 2-hour session was on general *new* things in CS4, bug fixes, and other cool stuff available in the tool for us wireframing/prototyping nerds. I’ve heard about FW before, and knew it had some cool stuff, but never really dug my hands into it. This new version puts FW into the (now) standard UI as the other Adobe tools. Other interesting points they made:

• strengths: prototyping and production. (Not sure what he means by production here. Maybe for creating production graphics and slicing them up?)
• “Symbols” allow for quickly using repetitive images/objects. Can live update all of the same symbol. Can download libraries of symbols online: XP/Vista form elements.
• Can create a “Common Library” of symbols for projects, or a company that has an established look/feel.
• “9-slicing” looks sweet! Can setup an object, and tell FW exactly what to stretch in the X/Y axis’s so it still looks correct when “free transforming” it.
• Integration with Flash objects.
• Pages/States in FW similar to Layer Comps in Photoshop. I use layer comps A LOT in building app mockups. They are sweet!

The second half of the demo was all about creating “click-through” prototypes in FW. Unfortunately, he didn’t show too much on how to create them, as much as showing big fancy protos that he created.

• Can create quite high fidelity protos with real visual designs from a brand/company. The web demos that he showed could have been production-ready html protos, except Adobe quickly admits that the code is messy and not “production” level.
• They use JQuery to embed javascript into the FW proto to make the proto actually react the real way. So they can create a textfield that the user can type into and then query a database using URL tag/value pairs. Sweet!

A nice quote they said a couple times: “FW prototypes become big ‘hacked’ demos with really messy code, but who cares! It’s only to sell an idea or test an idea.”

Overall…
I have been wanting to look at FW for awhile, as a viable prototyping tool, and this demo just peaked my interest even more. Will it make my employer regret buying iRise?… I doubt it. FW is nice, but lacks some major features that iRise has. I look forward to getting a copy of FW though, and seeing what I can do with it, for those times when I don’t have access to iRise.

Years ago I spent a lot of time creating some advanced Photoshop files with layers of form element images. With Fireworks, it looks like I can now throw that away!