As many know, I’m part of the local Seattle Developer / Designer Interaction group. There are many updates to this that are posted on the official site for this organization, but I wanted to post my own summary about it here.

Interact

First on the list is the name. We’ve decided that it would be best to simplify the name. We’ve renamed the group to, simply, Interact.

An official logo hasn’t yet been created, but we have a placeholder to assist with the transition created by David Kelley. I have a feeling that we’ll be holding onto this for a few weeks.

More interaction more of the time

Seattle D2ig (Seattle Developer / Designer Interaction Group) had its first meeting in October in 2008 and since has met every 3rd wednesday of each month. These meetings have been excellent and we’ve seen new faces presenting and attending since the group started. Presentations have occupied a variety of content including the workflow of iphone design and development, the change in Flash to seperate development to Flex, The Design Developers of the Zune, Microsoft Silverlight, and much more. But these are only once a month, and very overview with topics fitting into an hour and a half, sometimes two hours with a small group getting together for food and drink afterwards. The “but” in that is the overview “not enough” feeling.

Plus, the majority of those who join are either heavy on the Flash or on the Silverlight side of technologies – or somewhere in between. Because of this, we have 2 virtual SIGs that will soon be “live” to further the education growing cooperations between developers and designers.

What the heck does this mean?

It means that we’ll be meeting on 2 more occasions, but earlier in the day and virtually through Windows Live Meetings which will occur the first and second wednesdays at noon every month.

Wait, that’s lunch time! Yes, yes it is.(click on the links below for details)

Have Lunch with Interact on Silverlight
Have Lunch with Interact on Adobe

This is a very new chapter in this organization and as we grow, who knows – maybe more virtual meetings will come in the future.

I’ve heard often enough that some much prefer to at least be given the option on whether or not to have to view the Silverlight version site when going to my .com – so in lue of that, I’m updating my blog to be a more fully functional site rather than 90% blog. Tomorrow, I’ll have a landing page which gives visitors the choice to visit either the Silverlight 3 or non-Silverlight 3 version of my site.

Now there is a slight bit of an unfortunate circumstance with this new look to my site. I have this incredible plugin, but in the process of configuring it, I thought it might be beneficial to upgrade my wordpress to the latest version. Unfortunately, that broke the little font-page content scroller. I’ll either poke around into the files and see what I can do about fixing it or I’ll just wait until the original author upgrades their plugin to support the latest version of wordpress.

As to the recent upgrades, I’d have to say that I was very close to moving entirely away from wordpress – until the last week or two. I upgraded to the latest version. Not only is the administration far cleaner, but the plugins that 3rd-party authors are creating seems to be of higher quality as well. Sounds like the same story that many other software groups are going – better/ more usable design, cleaner coding, hightened standards.

So I give a huge shoutout to all who are developing and designing for WordPress. You guys are rockin’ at all that you’re doing!

So sorry for the oddball repostings of a few items to the blog, Twitter, and Facebook. These will discontinue shortly.

This is a test of the content population after a post has been made. I wonder if the actual content level is determinate of the string error that I’m seeing on the front page or not. We shall see as I’m typing quite a lot. I have to say that Pandora is great, though sometimes it seems that they are rating based on the thumb-ups matrix and not off of the thumb-down, so I’ll end up getting a series of horrid music and after a while, will just go to a different station that I’ve created. It would be nice to have it weigh my music listening off of the data of the down thumb as well as the thumb up.

Ah well.

Ok, was that enough content?