Flash Content vs the iPhone

With HTML 5 on the horizon, we were surprised to learn in an informal poll in a panel entitled “Flash is Dead! Long Live Flash!” that 90% of the attendees “like Flash” compared to only 10% in the audience who “hated Flash.” Although mobile devices are driving developers to strip out multimedia content, the satisfaction people get from a rich media experience isn’t going anywhere, and, if anything, we as developers have to gear ourselves toward developing targeted content for each platform.


Gaming is Healthy

World-renown author Jane McGonigal had some impressive stats that seemed to fly in the face of everything we think as developers, and even more so as parents: Playing video games is healthy! According to McGonigal, extensive studies show that people actually become more creative, more collaborative and more helpful to your own community when they play up to 28 hours of games per week! Of course, the caveats to this statistic are that you:

a) aren’t mean to other players within the games you play
b) don’t play with others who are mean
c) don’t play MORE than 28 hours per week.


Worst. Website. Ever.

In the most entertaining panel, we heard all about a made-up company that is building “apps” for the Brother Intellifax 2800. Mike Lacher entertained the crowd with a fake pitch to a venture capitalist for this incredibly stupid website idea. Our favorite quote from the presentation: “Get out your jean jackets, and prepare to be-dazzled!"


Critical Thinking About User Experience

We enjoyed a small activity in a panel this year that asked us to role-play answer questions of users as if we were a browser and a user was trying to use us to navigate a website. Each time the user encountered an error, we had to say out loud what the problem was, without offering any explanation if none was provided in the real online user experience. On the flip side, we learned that is was really hard to hold our tongues when users WERE doing the right things, like filling out forms correctly, etc. and it got us thinking about how we could do a better, more friendly job of providing friendly feedback to our customers for just about every interaction.


Which is Better When in Austin? BBQ or Mexican?

This year, we tried our best to settle the debate but the water remained muddy after a sunshiny visit to Rudy’s BBQ was one of the best team lunches we’ve ever had, and a Mexican dinner at Polvo’s delivered some of the most amazing fish fajitas we’ve ever tasted. Tough call. We’re pretty sure we’ll have to return to both just to be sure there isn’t a clear winner!

 
SXSW Attendance

We’re pretty sure attendance records were smashed this year. We’ve been attending for the past 5 or 6 years, and have seen the conference grow dramatically each and every year. This was no exception. Instead of running into many of the same people we’ve seen every year, we mostly met lots of new and interesting people with some great stories to tell. And maybe, just maybe next year, we’ll fork out the extra few bucks to keep Jeremy in town through the music portion of the conference! (It’s getting harder every year to be the “nerds” standing at the ticketing window at the airport on our way out, watching all the “rock stars” come in!)