Selective Transcoding — Designing Better Mobile Sites April 21, 2009

Networking: 5:30pm to 6pm
Seminar: 6pm to 7:30pm
The doors will be locked after 6pm!

RSVP
You don’t need to RSVP - Just show up!

Price
Free

Session abstract
Designing mobile optimized websites is hard. The last two years has seen tremendous growth in mobile internet usage in the Canadian and global marketplace. Smart phones are becoming more common and data plans are available to a larger number of customers, but the handset market remains fragmented with a large number of platforms and display sizes. Although newer smart phones offer browsers capable of rendering sites designed for desktop, a positive mobile experience will always depend on an optimized site. Building an optimized site that works well across the gamut of handsets remains expensive and time consuming.

Come learn how the Selective Transcoding method (ST), conceived and developed in Vancouver by Mobify, addresses these issues. ST lets designers design and automates the routine components of building a mobile presence while providing a unified mobile/desktop browsing experience on a site. Using a web-based interface a designer can choose components of an existing website for mobile. These components can then be styled and organized in a manner that dramatically decreases mobile bandwidth usage and serves content optimized for hundreds of mobile devices, without creating a separate mobile site or a new URL structure. ST’s unique architecture eliminates the need for duplication of content between mobile and desktop views and works with any underlying CMS architecture. Mobify, the first Selective Transcoding service, is currently deployed by leading web design blogs such as A List Apart, as well as conferences, brands and events around the world.

Our speaker
Peter McLachlan believes in a one web world that offers platform and context optimized views into a shared content base. He has a passion for usable mobile interactions and building community tools for improving cross-platform compatibility and user experience.

Peter wears many hats. He holds a MSc in computer science from UBC with a specialization in human computer interaction and does usability research on visualization systems. He is also a software architect and developer in multiple platforms and programming languages, focusing on Python and Django for web based applications. He is a system specialist in Linux services, serving as an IBM Linux services consultant for three years as a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). In his current work on selective transcoding (ST) he has cleaned the cobwebs out of many of the web’s ugliest compatibility corners.

Peter has published papers at the ACM Computer Human Interaction (CHI) and International Conference on Multimodal Interactions (ICMI).

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)
The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors
Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!