Bill Van Hecke

Bill is User Experience Lead at the Omni Group, one of the world’s most accomplished and affable Mac and iOS developers. His is the nebulous job of making software civilized enough to bring out in public. This involves lots of squinting six inches away from the Cinema Display at 3200% zoom and consulting etymology dictionaries to properly label buttons. It often ends up entwined with documentation, marketing, quality assurance, customer support, and Dungeon Mastering too.

Before Seattle, he lived near Chicago, where he wrote odd code for companies on the Board of Trade, and in Green Bay, where he operated nocturnally for a year. He also spends a prodigious amount of time in Tokyo, and has learned exotic foreign languages such as Dvorak, Python, and New Standard Tuning.

When not shoveling pixels or graphemes, Bill likes creating video games, translating video games, and, occasionally, playing video games.

SESSION(S): Designing Graceful, Gracious Interfaces for iPad

The iPhone snuck a new way of interacting with technology into our lives. Now, with the iPad, full-fledged touch computing is here. It's time to reconsider our preconceptions about how software should behave. What can your interface do better, now that people are touching it directly? Which of your desktop and web interaction assumptions are debris you should jettison, and which still apply? When you carve away the layers of mouse and keyboard and desktop trappings, what is your software really about?

You'll learn how the iPad experience respects users, encouraging their concentration and creativity, and how your apps can stay harmonious with those goals. You'll find out how the iPad is truly distinct from its iPhone and Mac siblings, and why it requires a whole new way of thinking about interface and interaction design. And we'll explore how the lessons of designing for iPad can help us see other platforms in a new way, too.