Last week Roundarch hosted Chicago Geek Girls‘ monthly dinner gathering. Chicago Geek Girls is a local branch of a network devoted to supporting the work and play of women who identify as geeks, many of whom work in tech jobs and/or companies. This was only the Chicago branch’s second formal dinner meeting and Roundarch was happy to invite them over to our office for tech talk, pizza and wine.

Geoff Cubitt, President and CTO of Roundarch, explained a bit about Roundarch, what we do, and demo’d a few of our more innovative projects. Niti Vaish and Rachelle Bowden, a Project Manager and Information Architect from Roundarch, talked about what makes a good company great. Other speakers were Heidi Miller, who encouraged people to enter the Knight News Challenge and Theresa Carter, who showed us the history of her site The Local Tourist and solicited any feedback the group may have.

Overall it was a great event. We were able to meet and share ideas with many interesting women and celebrate being geek girls. Even Geoff.

Heidi Miller and Geoff Cubitt

Roundarch hosted the New York chapter of the Interaction Design Association with an event intended to expose more people to the practice of design studio critique. Roundarch manager Victor Lombardi observed the variety of approaches that emerge when you drop 35 designers into a 60-minute design challenge.

I am headed to San Jose on Sunday for 3 days of giving talks, learning, talking, discussing, poking, prodding and representing Roundarch at the 2008 AJAXWorld RIA Conference.  I’ve been anticipating this event for quite some time, as the theme for this event grabbed my interest when SYS-CON Media first announced it: “2008: Decision Year for RIAs”.

As someone who has been actively involved in the strategy, design and development of Rich Client Interfaces for the Web since the mid-90′s, and who’s been an advocate for better user experience-enabling technology my whole career, I was honored to have been accepted as a speaker at this event.

Not only do I really like the people that work at SYS-CON (they really are nice, smart, fun and passionate about what they do), I know this event draws people from across industries, and more importantly… across the spectrum of Web and software technologies and corporate camps.

We really are at a really important time in the theoretical timeline of what the industry refers to as “RIAs”. To me this acronym refers to “Rich Internet Applications”, and started being used in 2001 or so with the release of Adobe’s “Flash MX” development software. Flash MX changed the game for interactive agencies and software development companies everywhere, as it was the first ubiquitous and stable platform for developing data-driven Web interfaces that didn’t “feel” like static Web pages.

While no first incarnation is perfect, in my mind, Flash MX was a game changer. The follow up to this was Macromedia creating the intial Flex framework for RIA development, Adobe buying Macromedia, Microsoft .NET, AJAX & Advanced HTML usage and more sophisticated browsers (and browser alternatives). We’ve come a LONG way since I started using “The Futuresplash Animator” in 1996.

AJAXWorld Talk

I will be giving my first of several talks at the conference on the first morning (Monday, Oct. 20th) right after the kick-off keynote. Because of the time and place of this presentation, I should have a pretty large audience, which is terribly exciting and fun for me because I think my presentation will be a nice introduction to the overall theme of the conference, and I a hopeful that it will leave the audience with a bit of energy to explore what the conference has to offer.

My talk description is something like:
Take a sneak peek at some of the concepts that have surfaced with Web 2.0 and learn how they appear to be evolving into the next wave of Rich Internet Applications. From 3-D interfaces and data visualization to whole new models of interaction, this session will provide you with real-world examples of how Web applications are moving towards the future.

I came up with that a while back, and since then, my presentation has expanded a bit. Doesn’t that always happen?

I plan to take the audience on a contextual journey of Rich Internet Application technology as well as other technologies related to user experience. This journey will lay out the past, present and future of our quest to enable ourselves to be able to design what we dream, and build what we design… the way we want it, not the way that we had to due to the variety limitations we’ve been faced with.