PDXRIA: Putting The Active Into Interactive November 18, 2010

Interactive is not a goal - it is a way of thinking and approaching problems. Though we have orders of magnitude more power at our fingertips, real interactivity is still illusive - but it need not be.

Interactive applications have been a multi-decade goal. Flex is yet another in a long history of frameworks for delivering interactive applications, but technology alone does not an interactive application make. You need to understand the problems, existing solutions and techniques for solving the problem, and the user of the application. Fast is never enough, because the complexity will grow until the app is not fast enough and pain limits what the user can do, underscoring the perception of your app - what the pain prevents me from doing vs. what the lack of pain enables me to do. Scaling is the name of the game - let's talk about bigger problems than you can imagine.

Speakers

Roy Hall has been writing interactive graphic applications for more than 30 years. Trained in civil engineering and architecture, he started writing 3D interactive apps for stadium roof design on E&S PSII's in the late 70's. He later wrote the rendering pipeline for Robert Abel and Associates (Tron - sucking Flynn into the computer and throwing him back out); was the system architect for Wavefront Technologies (Science and Technology Academy Award for that) - and which through many morphs is now the Maya animation software; was an Assistant Professor at Cornell's Program of Computer Graphics; wrote the 'Joey 3D toolkit' extensions for Microsoft MFC in the 90's; worked on the interaction model for Sketchup; and is now the CTO for Thetus Corporation.