Bill Buxton has been a computer science visionary for almost 30 years, and shares his thoughts about what the next 30 years—or 5 years, or 10—might look like, and what web designers and developers ought to be paying attention to. Notes are after the jump.

Brendan Dawes, hacker and interaction designer, trawled through his sketchbook to deliver an inspiring opening talk about his work, what inspires him, and some Rules for making. Full notes after the jump.

"My name's Robin, and I can't see."

This is one of the most moving talks I've ever seen at a technology conference. Robin talks about the history of assistive technology for the blind during his lifetime, and the dramatic change that the iPhone wrought. The blind have an old joke that asks "How many blind people does it take to cross the street?", and the answer was "Two: one to push the shopping cart full of devices for car-watching, curb-finding, direction-mapping, etc. And another to ask a sighted person for help." An affordable pocket computer with motion sensors, an accelerometer, a camera, and a thriving app ecosystem has changed all that. Robin went on to detail what specialty apps he uses, which mainstream apps are (and aren't) optimized for accessibility, and showed us the nitty-gritty of how technology changes his life and empowers him every day.

James has an fascinating and insightful take on how Art Direction—a concept from the print world—works in new ways on the web. He shares his thoughts about how to manage a brand across large groups of independent teams, as well as several really interesting implementation ideas and hacks. Head past the jump for the full notes.

Day 1 of the Future of Web Design was a fantastic workshop on designing for mobile with Josh Clark aka @globalmoxie, fellow Brooklynite and author of Tapworthy, a sharp guy, and a great speaker. Hop below the fold for the full notes.

I'm very excited to head to London next week to speak Code Literacy for Designers at the always-excellent Future of Web Design Conference. Working at Pivotal Labs, I've learned a lot over the last few years about how Agile software development and design interact, and I'm really looking forward to engaging in the conversation in one of my favorite cities. If you'll be at FOWD, please come check it out at 11:15 on Wed! And if you're in London and want to talk UX, drop me a line!

From the talk description:

Do you spend half your day on mockups in Illustrator and the other half on Javascript in a text editor? Know anyone who does? The way we work is changing. Rigid, traditionally defined roles like "Designer" and "Developer" are being displaced by interdisciplinary skillsets and a culture of collective product ownership. In this talk, we’ll investigate how treating Coding as Literacy can affect the way decisions are made and work gets done, describe how varying levels of literacy among teammates facilitate effective agile design and development, and discuss how designers can get literate in technical topics.

Interesting

Kris Hicks reassures us that the vim path through git interactive rebases need not lead to maddness. If you'd like to do an interactive rebase in your editor of choice (rather than Textmate, the Pivotal default) you can set the GIT_EDITOR flag. So go ahead to the terminal and

export GIT_EDITOR=vim && git rebase -i origin/master

Vim will launch, changes will be made, commits will be squashed, and all will be right with the world. Until you try to save; after making your changes and :wq-ing, the terminal will admonish you Could not execute editor.

The problem is a vi + Mac OS X + git incompatibility with pathogen (the vim package manager). To fix it, add the following lines to your .vimrc file:

filetype on
filetype off
...pathogen crap...
filetype on

For more on this issue, see http://andrewho.co.uk/weblog/vim-pathogen-with-mutt-and-git

Dangerous

Rayban reminds us that you best yield before you exit the block.

For example:

around_save :check_something, :if => "my_attribute_changed?"

def check_something
  return unless my_attribute == "foo"
  yield
  # do some stuff...
end

will not save unless my_attribute == "foo"— if your condition to run the around filter rarely happens you might not notice this fairly obvious behavior and be confused confused confused.

Dangerous / Interesting

• Schubert warns us that Rail's extensions that add to_time method may cast types in unexpected ways: Date#to_time => Time Time#to_time => Time but DateTime#to_time => DateTime

• Use === when checking equality with DateTime and you don't care about precision (This does not work with Time however)

• Your humble author cautions that the new Laullon GitX is not ready for prime time. When adding multiple files with a single click, a garbage commit with a long funny name is created without adding the files. Instead, consider Brother Bard's excellent fork of GitX

• Ian "Waffles" Zabel mentioned that jQuery 1.6 has been released. Notable changes include case-mapping of HTML5 data- attributes, performance improvements, and more.

• Lee Edwards reminds us "It's Star Wars Day. May the 4th be with you." <⁄rimshot>

On Tuesday night Pivotal Labs NY hosted the first "Agile Show & Tell", organized by the Agile Experience Design Meetup. More after the fold...

Last night Pivotal participated in the first ever New Tech Meetup Showcase. The Showcase offered 60 NYC technology companies a chance to show off their wares to a large and enthusiastic crowd, and Pivots Mark Michael, Dan Podsedly, and Ian McFarland held down the Pivotal table, demoing Tracker and seeing what other companies had to offer. The New York New Tech Meetup is the biggest meetup in the world with over 10,000 members, and—this being Internet Week in NYC—many of them were out in force. After the Showcase the action moved to 700-person auditorium where 7 companies gave 5-minute live demos to a rapt house.