Me and Kaya went to the Christmas girl geek AND guy geek dinner at OhSo Social (by the way, if you sign up with them you get a free bottle of wine) on Wednesday. It was really good, and totally put me in the festive spirit. We got given party bags with squishy spannerballs, stickers, bottle opener keyrings. I’m telling you, it was a real treat. Aral Balkan spoke and was entertaining as ever. He did what all the end-of-year TV programmes do and gave a rundown of all the exciting things that happened in 2007, and what we can look forward to in 2008.
What happened in 2007?
Aral clearly loves his iPhone (“I can touch the future with two of my fingers!”), and I’d agree that its launch was a pretty big 2007 event. It also demonstrated one of his points about usability over tonnes of functions featuring highly in 2007 design. He did show us some godawful examples of usability though, mainly banking-type sites and stressed that interfaces should not be built for developers (making their jobs easier) but for users. And if such un-usable sites are built that way to comply with W3C standards, then W3C standards are bollocks. Go for ‘usable accessibility’ instead i.e. user testing and common sense. On the subject of standards, he noted that the divide between accessibility/standards/CSS and Flash is getting smaller as the ‘Flash look’ is becoming more integrated in traditional sites and Flash designers/developers are becoming more concerned over accessibility. It’s all good.
Aral talked about 2007’s uptake of APIs and mashups (demonstrated with a lovely pic of mashed potato) and the possibilities open to developers to ‘ave a little bit of this and a little bit of that and mix it all together and create something cool.
Things to watch out for in 2008
2007 saw the start of the RIA (Rich Internet Application) and Aral reckons 2008 will see loads more gooduns. RIAs are online applications that act a bit like desktop applications. Online Photoshop anyone?
Flash games are going to get bigger and better, especially with 3D spunkiness. Check out the Papervision3D 2.0 demo to see the 3D spunkiness in action.
