merhl

May 16 / merhl

That Conference

Hey do you like Summer Camps? Do like great tech talks? Then make sure to attended That Conference. Guess what yours truly will be speaking as well, so that in itself should make you wanna go.

So what are you waiting for go check it out: http://thatconference.com/

Here’s what I’ll be chatting about.

A nice gesture can go a long way
Today we see several apps starting to push the boundaries of gestures. To the point that the gestures are making people think about them and testing the limits of human habits. We all know that Humans are creatures of habit they love doing things in their routine. Adding these gestures to apps people love are pushing theses habits and starting to make people change them, and others are just frustrating. I’ll take a look at a few apps that are pushing these normal routines with gestures. I’ll also talk about what makes a good gesture recognizable/relatable to people.

Contextual Design, the new wave in mobile design.
Responsive, Adaptive among others are the new things today with mobile design. I want to talk about the next big wave. Its all about Contextual Design. Think geo location, time based, even calendar aware design. I’ll walk through the word of Contextual Design and the key factors of what to think about to take advantage of it. I’ll also talk about some future thinking of what Contextual Design will bring. I’ll be bridging the gab between the digital and the physical world and how to start thinking about taking advantage of it.

Hope to see you there!

Apr 26 / merhl

One Second Epic

I am happy to announce that we are apart of StartGarden.com and are working on OneSecondEpic.com. More details coming soon.

Mar 5 / merhl

Recap of Mobile World Congress 2012

This was my 2nd time to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress one of the largest unknown conferences. Think of it as the CES of Europe, its crazy. Here is a little recap of what I saw.

Blackberry/QNX Porsche
I got the chance to get a VIP tour of all the bells and whistles of the BlackBerry/QNX Porsche. The car is great it has 3 Playbooks, one in the centerstack, and 2 on the back of the headrests. Now the 2 on the back of the headrest are more for show then actual use, since no one of decent size can fit in the back seats of this car. The instrument cluster also has the QNX platform running some openGL graphics that could be customized for driving. The kicker is all this stuff really worked, the guys that worked on the car actually got it for a weekend and tested out all the stuff. The other interesting thing is the audio for taking phone calls. Its in stereo. Actually the audio is hooked up to the playbook and pumps out stereo so you can get that left/right channel effect. It also had some super noise canceling technology in there so you could hear just about everything, even in the loud conference hall.

Playbook Confetti Demo
I saw a very interesting demo from a TAT dev in the BlackBerry booth. Rather then have me explain it just check out the video. We have some very similar ideas for iBrainstorm.

Android Booth
Android booth was large, and had a interesting tactile wall.

Overall the conference was massive and has everything under the sun. If you want to see even more converge, most of the large blog sites have some great info.