Notes and news, insights and inspiration from the autonomous collective mind of GS.

One of the joys of working at GS Design is the talented people I work with who have interests and creative drives outside the workplace. There’s an ongoing show-and-tell session among many of us for what we’ve created in our spare time.

Now it’s my turn. I present to you the TwittaBox 9001!

I’ve been working on this little red box on and off for two years. Using the geek-culture darling, the Arduino prototyping platform, the TwittaBox 9001 is a miniature Webserver on the GS Design network. With a simple single-page form, a very short anonymous message can be sent to it and displayed on the LCD display. The finger inviting arcade-style buttons permit cycling through a list of new messages and deleting old messages. Flashing “new message” lights complete the silly little thing.

Okay, so it really has nothing to do with Twitter. But what it does demonstrate is that the devices we’re connecting to the Internet are increasingly things that we wouldn’t identify as “a computer.” The term used for describing this trend is “The Internet of Things.”

When we think of the Internet, we think of many computers connected by a single logical network. What we mean by “a computer,” however, has been changing and will continue to change. Originally, it was the dishwasher-sized PDP-11s and VAXs of universities, and the mainframes of the U.S. military and their contractors. Then were added the desktop PCs of the ’80s and ’90s, along with the pizza box-shaped servers they connected to. Now we hold in our hands the mobile Internet in the form of smartphones and tablet computers. Each step of downsizing leads to many more devices connected to the Internet each time. And the physical downsizing of computing won’t end there. Anything that can be connected to the Internet WILL be connected to the Internet. The only reason not to do such a thing is cost. The core of my TwittaBox is a microcontroller that costs less than $2.

What we normally identify as “a computer” is changing, always has been changing, and will continue to change.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see every lightswitch in a home connected by WiFi and controllable by a smartphone app – and that level of computing will represent pennies of cost.

What comes next? Will our jeans know how many times they’ve been washed, report this back to their manufacturer, and a sale offer for a new pair be emailed when they’re reaching their expected end of life? Will our shoes know how far they’ve “walked” and their owner receive a discount on their healthcare premiums if it’s over a certain average daily distance?

If such things sound too far out there, too far in the future, remember that the iPhone came out in 2007. Android devices were available about a year after that. Five years later, it’s hard to imagine a world without smartphones. The Nest thermostat and Philips Hue wireless lighting are examples of what’s possible today. The next five years will pass quickly.

Hang on. It gets crazy from this point on.

I may sound like a “Get off my lawn!” old-timer, but my first Web access was through dial-up phone connection. Ah, my loyal USRobotics 9600-baud MODEM.

T’was a piece of crap.

My current iPhone has Web access speeds at least 40 times faster than that. My cable modem connection is about 80 times faster than that. And it’s still not enough. The New York Times ran an eye opening article citing the fact that while Web browsing we have gotten use to speed. And we want more. The one-line summary of the article is that studies by Google and Microsoft suggest that the goal for Web page loading should be sub-second and that a difference of as little as 250 milliseconds can be enough to turn site visitors away. This is down from the 2-second goal that use to float around a few years ago. Compare this with the thinking held back in 2007 that suggested a 4-second rule – and an 8-second rule back in the ’90s – and you see where expectations are going!

In terms of the industry of Web development, this affects EVERYBODY:

• Graphic designers need to produce artwork that can rely on CSS-defined styles (vs. graphic images) as much as possible.
• Front-end developers need to squeeze every byte they can – optimize PNGs, don’t use redundant asset references, don’t make CSS references to graphics you don’t need.
• Application developers needs are about server-side code performance; whenever possible cache, cache, cache!
• System administrators need to tweak Apache and MySQL configurations for performance (because default settings just don’t cut it) and look into CDN services along with AppDevs.
• Project managers need to make sure the above people are doing their jobs! And share industry thinking with clients to communicate the value their agencies are providing them.

This is all a lot of work up front and requires eternal vigilance to assure that page delivery times stay consistently fast. But in order to give our clients the edge over their competitors, we have to do it!

What’s in the Future? WHAT? The future is ALREADY HERE!?

The need for speed is colliding with a new development – the New iPad and its Retina Display. Very high resolution displays are coming. First it was the iPhone 4, then to the 2012 edition of the iPad, soon to notebook computers and then to desktops. Oh, and your HDTV may start looking bad, too, with 4K HD standards coming. So at the very same time that Websites need to deliver pages faster than ever, those pages will have larger than ever file-size images attached to them.

Ouch!

What to do?! Get SPDY!

Some help is on the way. The venerable HTTP protocol that is used to deliver Web pages has not been changed much in 12 years. Google is looking to change that. SPDY is a revision to the HTTP protocol that seeks to reduce the overhead of page delivery. SPDY requires that both the Web browser a site visitor is using AND the Web server serving the requested page support the SPDY protocol. Google Chrome has supported SPDY for awhile now. Firefox supports SPDY, but only recently and only if one enables it. Simply put, this is an evolving technology that isn’t pervasive – yet. Furthermore, Microsoft also recognizes the need for a faster Web and working to take the goals of SPDY even further. This will hopefully lead to specifications that ALL software products can use to make a faster Web for all of us, regardless of the browser or device we use.

Content Strategy.  For web communications, it's on the forefront of the mind of every industry professional these days.  Or it should be. As an industry we've been focusing on the container not the content for years now.  To be fair, it's only recently that the technology developed to a point where we didn't have to work so hard to coax code and graphic design to do what we wanted it to do and could think of concentrating on other things. Like the reason we make websites in the first place. Content Strategy reminds us that we've been putting the cart before the horse for quite some time now.  And as an industry we are waking up to that fact and making changes to the very production process of web communications.  Recently I read an interview with Karen McGrange, an upcoming speaker at the Do It With Drupal conference.  Karen is a Content Strategist at Bond Art + Science. In this interview while discussing the importance of content, she nailed it:

I think so much of web design and development is approached as just that: design and development. What does it look like and feel like? What are the technologies we'll use? How will we code this? There's been this third leg of the stool, the content, that we've never really talked about, or we've treated as somebody else's problem. We say, "Oh, that's the client's problem!" or, "We're going to come in, and we'll do a redesign and put in a CMS, and that will solve everyone's web problems!"

One commenter of the above article extended what Karen had to say by saying:

Content is rarely the focus of web redesigns and this often leads to massive budgets being used to create incredibly attractive "containers" (and of late, attractive and 'responsive' containers).

Really good stuff.  Everyone must read this. (via Kristina Halvorson)