tech-talks

Four UX industry leaders came to SI tonight to talk about 'What makes an effective UX professional;' the event was put on by Michigan UPA (MUPA), the Michigan/Ohio chapter of CHI (MOCHI), the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction at the School of Information (SOCHI), and the School of Information Career Development Office. Each panelist gave an introduction and some tips, and then the panelists took questions from the audience. Following are some liveblogged notes from each panelist's individual talk as well as a summary of the panel discussion.

Today Tyler Bell, Product Manager for the Geo Technologies group at
Yahoo!, spoke at SI on the subject of Geo Informatics (or as the wikipedia entry puts it, geoinformatics.

Talk Description: Location-Aware Applications are all the rage in today's
technology and start-up scene. Yet understanding location and providing
the best user experience entails much more than simply putting dots on a
map. This short talk provides an overview of how Yahoo! tackles
geographic context and entity recognition to connect our users with the
world around them.

Read on for notes from SOCHI attendees!

SI 635 today had Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP and current employee of Yahoo, as a guest speaker. Lerdorf spoke about the topic of PHP - Then, Now and the Future, a look at how PHP got to where it is today and the impact it has had on the Web.

After telling about his interesting history of growing up in Greenland and living in various places worldwide, Lerdorf talked about how he was first attracted to technology with the advent of the web and Mosaic in 1993.

In our first tech talk of the new year SOCHI invited Dug Song, VP of Engineering for Zattoo, to speak about the local Ann Arbor company's internet TV service. Zattoo's web application allows users to watch live TV via the site's channels on their personal computer. So far they have over 4 million registered users in Europe for their service.

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

This week Jim Laing presented a lunch hour tech talk on Adobe Flex, an open source framework that allows designers to develop rich internet applications. Here are some notes from Jim's talk:

• Flex runs on client not on the server - not really a web technology, really a desktop technology
• Flex competitors - ajax with toolkits like ExtJS; Microsoft silverlight
• Flex enables designer to rapidly prototype applications, allows new user interactions that other technologies don't have
• Flex - content is king - everything is subservient to the content

SOCHI held our first Tech Talk of the semester this afternoon on Axure, a prototyping tool. We had great attendance - probably 20 or 25 people I would estimate. There are several classes with group projects which could benefit from using Axure, so now is the perfect time in the semester to learn a new tool.

Since I covered so much in my demo, I wanted to post the links to the resources I mentioned so you can check them out for yourself.