Simplicity & Complexities, with PPK and Stephen Hay

Mirabeau (https://www.mirabeau.nl) Rotterdam will be the host of the second #NLHTML5 meetup. In this meetup we will discuss complexities, in our workflow and browsers.

Talk 1: The plural of Chromium is Chromia - Peter-Paul Koch

Where web developers expect Chrome to offer a single platform for web sites and web apps, and that all Android 4.3+ users use Chrome as their default browser, reality is diverging at a fast clip. Google Chrome has never been the default browser on any system, except for Google's own Nexus and the Motorolas that were created while Google owned the company. Most important Android vendors, such as Samsung, HTC, and LG, are now using their own Chromium-based browsers as defaults. So far PPK identified eleven of them, and they're all subtly different.

What's going on? Why does everyone want its own Chromium? Why doesn't Google step in and force Google Chrome on everybody? And what's the deal with that other Android default browser, Android WebKit?

In this presentation PPK explains.

Peter-Paul Koch is a mobile platform strategist, browser researcher, consultant, and trainer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He specialises in the mobile web, and especially mobile browser research. On the Web he’s universally known as PPK.

He won international renown with his browser compatibility research (http://quirksmode.org/compatibility.html), founded Fronteers (https://fronteers.nl/), the Dutch association of front-end professionals, and advises mobile and desktop browser vendors on their implementation of Web standards.

Meanwhile he concentrates on the mobile web, and then especially on the aspects he feels web developers are ignoring, such as the UC browser and Xiaomi and Micromax devices. His personal collection consists of about 50 mobile phones, and he uses about half of them in his daily testing. Occasionally one of them emits a soft, melancholy beep, but he has no idea which one and studiously ignores it.

Talk 2: Maintaining Simplicity - Stephen Hay

Everyone talks about the benefits of simplicity. Yet many of us end up adding a heavy amount of complexity to inherently simple things. In fact, many web designers and developers end up spending significant amounts of project time undoing problems caused by complexities added early in the design process. In effect, we often ruin the things we build during the process of building them, but it doesn't have to be that way. In this session, Stephen looks at how and why we complicate things, and then looks at how an exaggerated application of progressive enhancement can help us maintain simplicity and increase value for the people using the things we make.

Californian by birth and Dutchman by choice, Stephen Hay is author of Responsive Design Workflow (New Riders, 2013) and contributor to Smashing Book #3. He is a frequent speaker at industry events. While spending an increasing amount of time teaching, writing, and speaking, Stephen still spends the majority of his time working with clients large and small through his consultancy, Zero Interface (http://zerointerface.nl/).

Event Schedule:

• 18:00 Doors open, eat and drink
• 19:00 Intoduction
• 19:15 Peter-Paul Koch
• 20:00 Break
• 20:30 Stephen Hay
• 21:15 Drinks and snacks
• 22:30 Room cleared

Notes:

• Smile! We are recording and photographing this event.
• All talks will recorded so you can watch the recordings of all of our events at http://bit.ly/nlhtml5videos from the comfort of your home.
• If you'd like to sponsor this or any future NLHTML5 event, contact Paul Verbeek on Twitter (@_paulverbeek (http://twitter.com/_paulverbeek))
• Note that by attending any of our events, you are agreeing to our code of conduct: confcodeofconduct.com (http://confcodeofconduct.com/)