SXSW 2010 Wrap Up

We're back! This past weekend a few of us from AlterImaging headed down to Austin, TX to get our yearly fix of all things internet. This year was a little different from past years in that there were no huge announcements in the realm of social media and no clear winner of the "next big thing" title. Yes, Twitter did announce their @anywhere add on which should help boost twitter's adoption rate but this years conference definitely seemed to revolve around how things are evolving. For example, the next generation of web languages - HTML5 and CSS3 and how this affects web design. Subsequently there was also a lot of talk and debate about how Flash is dead due to the fact these coding languages along with Javascript are taking it's place and rightly so.



Although HTML5 and CSS3 are not going to be finalized for another year or two web designers are already implementing some of their features into their sites. Things like rounded corners, drop shadows, specialty fonts, drag and drop, and multiple backgrounds used to take a bit of know how, some javascript and a bit of coding trickery can now be done in 1/4 the time it used to take. It was also interesting to see the cool things you could do with geolocation as well as video no longer dependent on flash or some other plugin to embed it such as this ambient light video using CSS3 and HTML5 video. Way cool!

As I mentioned though it'll still be a bit before these standards are 100% and then there will still be the browser adoption rate issue where a large percentage of users will refuse to upgrade their browsers for one of the many reasons why they typically don't. I can only hope as sites become more advanced that these users will see what they're missing out on and join the future.

In addition to all this technical stuff that I picked up I was able to attend a few panels on workflow from the folks over at 37Signals and design principals and techniques from some of the industries finest. Plus it was just such a cool thing to be around and exchange ideas with such positive people over some texas beers and bbq for the weekend. Can't wait to start applying all the new stuff I learned!