Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 122

August in America, day twenty-four

Today was the opening day of An Event Apart Chicago so I spent the whole day at the back of the room absorbing the knowledge bombs being dropped.

As usual, the quality of the talks was excellent, and quite a few of them set me up nicely for my talk tomorrow. I’ll be reiterating a lot of what Ethan said about progressive enhancement—no surprise there.

I’m on first thing tomorrow. That’s the hangover slot (thanks for booze, Media Temple). I’m kind of nervous about the talk. Now that I’ve given it once already—at An Event Apart DC earlier this month—I shouldn’t be worried, but I’m going to attempt something a bit new tomorrow. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be left with egg on my face.

Wish me luck.

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August in America, day twenty-three

Powers Of Ten is a remarkable short film created by Charles and Ray Eames in 1968. It deals with scale, going out to the distance of our galactic neighbourhood and down to the Planck measurement.

It all begins in a park in Chicago.

Ever since first seeing the film I thought it would be fun to find the exact spot around which the universe is explored by the Eameses. I also thought I probably wasn’t the first geek to think that. But my preliminary googling didn’t turn up any prior art. So I put the call out on Twitter:

Geocoders of the lazyweb: I’m trying to figure out the exact lat/lon coordinates of the Eames’ “Powers Of Ten” http://t.co/1lFnZAvm4V Go!

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio) August 25, 2013

Within minutes, Matthew came through for me:

@adactio The park's been remodelled, but it's somewhere about (41.864726,-87.613471).

— Matthew Somerville (@dracos) August 25, 2013

Although, as Dan pointed out, that opening shot was actually filmed in LA:

The actual live action of the picnic scene was filmed in Los Angeles, where Charles and Ray could oversee all aspects of production for the critical opening moments.

Nonetheless, armed with latitude and longitude coordinates, Jessica and I set out to find the one metre square patch of Chicago that’s used as the starting point for the film. We began the trek from our riverside hotel, stopping for an Intelligentsia coffee along the way, passing by the bean to take obligatory mirror shots, and through Millenium Park down to the Field Museum and the Schedd Aquarium, the perfect spot to stop for a Chicago-style hot dog.

With a bit more walking, we made it to the lat/lon coordinates—a more arboreal location now than it was back when Powers Of Ten was filmed. I did what any self-respecting nerd in my situation would do: I made a new spot on Foursquare.

Mission accomplished. After that, we hopped on a water taxi back up to Navy Pier. This short boat ride made Jessica inordinately happy. It certainly was a lovely day to be out on the water. ‘Though I had to keep reminding myself that we were on a lake, not an ocean.

When we got back to our hotel, we asked at reception if there might be a riverside view that we could move to. There was and we did. Now when we look out of our hotel window, we can see the stunning architecture of downtown Chicago in all its glory.

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August in America, day twenty-two

I’m back from a lovely evening out with Jared and Jessica, unwinding in my Chicago hotel room after a day of travel.

It began with a journey on the BART to San Francisco airport. Figuring out how to operate the BART ticket machines is always an interesting exercise in bizarro world interface design. But figure it out we did, and Jessica and I made it to the airport in plenty of time …which is just as well, because it took the TSA quite a while to find someone to give me my pat-down when I opted out of using the millimetre wave scanner.

The four hour flight to Chicago passed without incident. We had bulkhead seats which meant we could stretch our legs out a little bit more. We ate some snacks. We watched some bad comedies: Identity Thief and The Hangover Part III.

When we arrived in Chicago, there was a car waiting to take us to our hotel: one of the excellent perks provided to speakers at An Event Apart. In mere hours, we made it through rush-hour Chicago traffic to the Westin hotel.

When we were checking in, there was a notice to guests that things might get a little noisy in the early hours of Sunday night and Monday morning. They’re planning to do some helicopter-shot filming for two movies currently in production: Michael Bay’s Transformers 4 and the Wachowski siblings’ Jupiter Ascending. Guests are requested to keep their windows shut.

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August in America, day twenty-one

I played truant from UX Week this morning to meet up with Mike for a coffee and a chat at Cafe Vega. We were turfed out when the bearded, baseball-capped, Draplinesque barista announced he had to shut the doors because he needed to “run out for some milk.” So went around the corner to the Code For America office. The place had a layout similar to what we’ve got planned for the new Clearleft building so I immediately starting documenting it with pictures (although it probably looked like I was just trying to sneakily take pictures of Tim O’Reilly).

After catching up with Mike, I rendezvoused with Jessica back at the hotel and we headed out for lunch at Mel’s diner. The espresso milk shakes there are a must-have on any San Francisco trip I make.

Then it was a race against time to try to get to the Mission Bay Conference Center to catch Sophia’s talk at UX Week. She ran the gist of the talk by me yesterday and it sounded great. Alas, I missed the first half of it, but what I caught was reaffirming much of what I was hammering home in my workshops yesterday.

UX Week wrapped up with the inimitable Ze Frank. As I said to Peter afterwards, he’s always reliable but never predictable.

Having said my goodbyes and my thanks to the lovely UX Week people, I met up with Jessica again for a feast of sushi at Hana Zen, right by the hotel. That’s three nights in a row that we’ve had really good asian cuisine downtown: Thai, Chinese, and Japanese.

We finished the evening in good company at the home of young Master Ben, observing the ritual of games night, sipping beers, and resisting the temptation of the cheese.

Tomorrow we depart for Chicago. Farewell, San Francisco; lovely to see you again, as always.

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August in America, day twenty

As predicted, today’s schedule of two back-to-back half-day workshops at UX Week was indeed quite exhausting. But it was also very rewarding.

Every time I run a workshop, I always end up learning something from the experience and today was no exception. The attendees were a bright bunch with lots of great questions and discussion points.

Once the workshops were done, I felt pretty exhausted. Jessica and I had a quiet night sampling the culinary delights of M.Y. China conveniently located just across the street from our hotel so I could collapse into bed at the end of the day.

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August in America, day nineteen

Tomorrow I’m going to be spending all day teaching workshops at UX Week: two back-to-back half-day workshops on Responsive UX. So today I took it easy in preparation for what will probably be a knackering day tomorrow.

Jessica and I moved from Tantek’s place to a downtown hotel near Union Square; like I said, despite the fact that UX Week goes on for four days, they only provide speaker accommodation for three, guaranteeing that speakers won’t be around for the whole event. Very odd.

We checked into the hotel, grabbed some sandwiches and sat out in Yerba Buena park, soaking up some sun. It was a bright blue clear day in San Francisco. After that strenuous activity, we went for a coffee and strolled along Embarcadero, finishing the day with some excellent Thai food …just a harrowing walk through the Tenderloin away.

Now I’m going to fret over my workshop material and have a restless night of stress dreams. Wish me luck!

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Double tap delay

Even though my encounter with Ted yesterday was brief, we still managed to turn the conversation to browsers, standards, and all things web in our brief chat.

Specifically, we talked about this proposal in Blink related to the 300 millisecond delay that mobile browsers introduce after a tap event.

Why do browsers have this 300 millisecond delay? Well, you know when you’re looking at fixed-width desktop-based website on a mobile phone, and everything is zoomed out, and one of the ways that you can zoom in to a specific portion of the page is to double tap on that content? A double tap is defined as two taps less than 300 milliseconds apart. So whenever you tap on something in a touch-based browser, it needs to wait for that length of time to see if you’re going to turn that single tap into a double tap.

The overall effect is that tap actions feel a little bit laggy on the web compared to native apps. You can fix this by using the fastclick code from FT Labs, but I always feel weird solving a problem on mobile by throwing more front-end code at it.

Hence the Blink proposal: if the author has used a meta viewport declaration to set width=device-width (effectively saying “hey, I know what I’m doing: this content doesn’t need to be zoomed”), then the 300 millisecond delay could be removed from tap events. Note: this only affects double taps—pinch zoom is unaffected.

This sounds like a sensible idea to me, but Ted says that he sometimes still likes to double tap to zoom even in responsive designs. He’d prefer a per-element solution rather than a per-document meta element. An attribute? Or maybe a CSS declaration similar to pointer events?

I thought for a minute, and then I spitballed this idea: what if the 300 millisecond delay only applied to non-focusable elements?

After all, the tap delay is only noticeable when you’re trying to tap on a focusable element: links, buttons, form fields. Double tapping tends to happen on text content: divs, paragraphs, sections. That’s assuming you are actually using buttons and links for buttons and links—not spans or divs a-la Google.

And if the author decides they want to remove the tap delay on a non-focusable element, they can always make it focusable by adding tabindex=-1 (if that still works …does that still work? I don’t even know any more).

Anyway, that was my not-very-considered idea, but on first pass, it doesn’t strike me as being obviously stupid or crazy.

So, how about it, browser makers? Does removing the 300 millisecond delay on focusable elements—possibly in combination with the meta viewport declaration—make sense?

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August in America, day eighteen

UX Week kicked off today. It’s a four-day event: one day of talks, followed by two days of workshops, followed by another day of talks. I’ll be spending all of the third day doing workshops back-to-back.

Bizarrely, even though it’s a four-day event, they only offer speakers three nights of accommodation. Seems odd to me: I would’ve thought they’d want us to stick around for the whole thing.

So, as I don’t get my hotel room until tomorrow, today I had to make my way from Tantek’s place in the Haight all the way over to the Mission Bay Conference Center—a fairly long MUNI ride. Alas, that meant I missed Steven Johnson’s opening talk. Curses!

Fortunately I did make it time for Ian Bogost’s talk, which was excellent.

In the afternoon, I walked over to Four Barrel, the excellent coffee shop that was celebrating its fifth birthday. They had a balloons, a photo both, a petting zoo, games, and best of all, free coffee. Tom popped by and we had a lovely time chatting in the sun (and drinking free coffee).

Seeing as I was in the Mission anyway, it would’ve been crazy not to have a mission burrito, so a trip to Papalote quickly followed. Best of all, Erin popped by. Then, as we were heading home via Delores Park, we met up with Ted. Just like I hoped!

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August in America, day seventeen

Today began bright and early with a delicious breakfast at Zazie. Every other time I’ve been to that place, I’ve had to wait in line for ages because on the weekends, it’s a ridiculously popular spot in Cole Valley. Today, being a Monday, there was no wait at all.

But most of today revolved around a later meal. Cindy and Matt reserved a table at Quince, a swanky restaurant that I knew would be good from seeing Larry’s pictures. The problem was I needed a suitably swanky outfit.

Now, I began this American trip with a decent enough ensemble; my Hiut jeans and a matching typically-flowery shirt. But over the course of my travels, those jeans developed a split, then a hole, then a rip. So I picked up a pair of black trousers when I was in San Diego. That’s all well and good, but my flowery shirt is dark blue …dark blue and black really don’t match. So I needed to find a nice shirt, one that would work with a pair of black trousers, and I needed to find them as soon as possible.

That’s why Jessica and I spent most of the afternoon going up and down Haight Street, popping into every vintage or thrift store we came across. In one of those stores, I found a Ben Sherman shirt. Amazingly, it fit me. Even more amazingly, it was just twelve dollars. Bargain!

I feel like there should be alternative fashion shows, where the models sashay down the catwalk and—upon reaching the end—stop and say, “See this shirt? Twelve bucks! Bargain!”

With my shirt mission fulfilled, I shined my shoes, scrubbed up and headed out with Jessica to rendezvous with Cindy and Matt for an unforgettable evening of excellent food and wine.

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August in America, day sixteen

Today was mostly a travel day. The flight from San Diego to San Francisco is a short hop, but when that flight is delayed by two hours, you’re going to spend far longer than intended within the confines of an airport. That’s what happened to me and Jessica today.

Still, it’s not a bad airport as airports go. And as airports go, it went.

With the delayed departure, the flight itself, and then the taxi ride in from the airport, by the time we finally made it to Tantek’s place it was late afternoon. But we were still made it in time for our dinner date with Cindy and Matt, and Daniel and Sharon.

We uber-ed over to Daniel and Sharon’s place (“to uber” is a perfectly cromulent verb in this town). For once, it was a bright, clear day in San Francisco and we were treated to the gorgeous view of the city laid out below us as we went from the Haight to Bernal Heights.

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