A growing number of developers are opting to build their mobile apps in cross-platform HTML5 code that can be compiled into native apps that can be sold in app stores and markets. Learn how you can do this too!

UMBC Athletics is pleased to announce that seven alumni and one current beloved staff member will comprise its 2014 UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame class:

Justin Bronson ’09, men’s swimming & diving, earned five gold medals in America East Championship competition in individual races and three golds in relay events, in addition to numerous silver and bronze medals. He was selected as the America East Conference Swimmer of the Week once as a freshman, twice as a junior and three times in his senior year. The native of Oshawa, Ontario, Canada still holds the school record in 500-yard freestyle.

Kelly Fiorani ’06, women’s lacrosse, currently ranks third on UMBC’s all-time scoring list in lacrosse with 189 points. She scored 140 goals and added 49 assists from 2003-06. Fiorani was a member of UMBC’s Northeast Conference champion and NCAA Tournament team in 2003. She was named Northeast Conference Rookie of the Year in 2003 and received America East First Team honors and All-Championship Team honors in 2004 and 2006. She also received two letters in soccer and ranked second in points (10) for the 2004 squad. Fiorani was named UMBC’s Outstanding Female Senior Athlete in 2006.

Jay Greene ’09, men’s basketball, has played the most basketball games, 122, and logged the most minutes, 4,192, in Retriever basketball history. A current assistant coach with UMBC, Greene dished out 683 assists, the most in school history, the third-most ever in America East Conference history and the third-most of any NCAA Division I player in the state of Maryland. He was named the Reggie Lewis Most Outstanding Player in the 2008 America East Tournament, leading the Retrievers to their first tournament title and NCAA berth. In his junior season, he was the lone player in the nation to be ranked in the top five in the nation in assist-to-turnover ratio and assists per game. An America East All-Rookie team member in 2005-06, Greene earned First-Team All-Conference honors in 2007-08 and Second Team honors in his senior campaign.

Ray Ignacio ’87, men’s lacrosse, earned Honorable Mention All-American in 1987. He is currently tenth in NCAA history in face-off winning percentage (63.4%) and his 69.6% mark led the nation in 1987. Ignacio is UMBC’s single season leader in draws and is the current leader with 450 face-offs won. He is a member of the UMBC All Time Lacrosse Team, was the 1987 UMBC Lacrosse team captain and played in the 1987 North-South All-Star Game.

Cindy Kubiet, Director of Sports Medicine, 1978-present, established a training program which includes recruitment, educational forums, clinical experiences and a career development and mentor program. Her holistic approach toward working with student athletes led to the creation of a life skills program at UMBC in 1986. Kubiet was awarded the Board of Regents’ University System of Maryland Staff Award for her outstanding service to students in an academic or residential environment in 2007.

Alessandra Pedergnana ’06, women’s tennis, becomes the first women’s tennis player selected to the UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame. As a freshman in 2003, she won 27 matches and was named All Conference in both singles and doubles in the Northeast Conference. She earned All-America East honors in 2004 and played at No. 1 singles for her final two seasons. As a senior, she won her 100th career match and finished the campaign with an impressive 13-4 record. She was named UMBC’s co-Senior Female Athlete of the Year in 2006.

Kristie Pickeral ’06, softball, was the 2002 Northeast Conference Rookie of the Year, helping UMBC reach the NCAA Championships. A year later, she earned NEC Player of the Year with a .387 batting average, 12 HR’s and 59 RBI. The third baseman is currently UMBC’s all-time hits leader with 263 and she slugged 40 home runs. She is also the all-time leader in RBI (179), games played and started (242), total bases (416) and walks, and was the 2005 UMBC Most Outstanding Female Athlete.

Brian Rowland ’03, men’s soccer, holds UMBC’s single season (11, 2002) and career shutouts record (25) as a goalkeeper in men’s soccer. He earned First Team All-Northeast Conference honors in his senior season of 2002. He is currently seventh in school history with 227 saves and has played professionally both indoors (Baltimore, Milwaukee, Orlando) and outdoors (Crystal Palace USA, Toronto Lynx). Rowland is currently an assistant men’s soccer coach at the University of Maryland.

The UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame dinner and inductions will take place on Saturday evening, January 25, at the Southeast Club Level of M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. The inductees will also be honored at halftime of the UMBC men’s basketball game versus Hartford that afternoon. Get tickets today.

Honors College Professor Ellen Handler Spitz is participating in a roundtable discussion at the Helix Center in New York City devoted to the topic of children’s drawing. The program will focus on linguistic, art historical, and psychoanalytic perspectives on drawings by Ethiopian children.

The roundtable, titled “From Children’s Sights to Our Insights: Ethiopian Children’s Drawings, Stories and Inner Lives,” is scheduled to take place Saturday, January 25th from 2:30-4:30 p.m.

Other panelists include Theodore Shapiro, Professor Emeritus at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and Nathan M. Szajnberg, Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. 

You can read more about the event here.

UPDATE 2/12/14: The complete video of the Helix Center roundtable discussion is now posted online and it can be watched in its entirety below.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zKT448JlWc&w=560&h=315]

The present is always the best time to take a step back and analyze your design process, because there’s nothing more valuable than your limited time on this planet. Could you spend your time making a bigger impact? Are you getting bogged down in details that don’t matter? How can you use your time more wisely?

Time is precious. Don’t waste it! – Photo from Flickr user Neal Fowler.

If you have a good design process, you’ll create better design and more of it (which should also mean more money). These tips are mostly applicable to designers, but developers can certainly benefit as well. Let’s dig in.

Understand

The most important step in any design process is to understand the problem. In this early phase, you should spend most of your time talking to your stakeholders (whether that’s a client, your boss, or yourself). Time spent understanding the problem will save massive amounts of time later on, because the changes you make should be smaller. Iteration is inevitable, but making changes early is cheaper than changes made later on.

When speaking with clients, make sure your questions are centered on the user’s goals. Nobody opens a web app or a mobile app arbitrarily. Rather, they have some sort of goal in mind, even if it’s a subconscious goal. The user might want to book an appointment, browse the latest news, or learn a new skill. Push this line of questioning until both you and your stakeholders share a detailed understanding of the product’s role in the user’s life.

How to Freelance and How to Run a Web Design Business on Treehouse can help you understand more about how to work with clients.

Sketch

After you have a keen understanding of the user’s goals, it’s time to start putting ideas into visuals. Designing in Photoshop, Illustrator, and other similar tools can take a tremendous amount of time because they’re more detail than you need (at first). Even a wireframing tool like Balsamiq Mockups or Omnigraffle might be overkill.

An example of a wireframe mockup created in Balsamiq Mockups.

The best way to start rendering visuals is with a simple drawing tool. I prefer a writing utensil and paper, but a simple sketching app for a tablet can work as well. As long as it’s fast and cheap for you to try ideas. At this point, you should mostly focus on fundamental shapes and composition. Create the rough outline for each page element and then place them together. The most important elements should be emphasized through any combination of unique shape, increased size, or contrast of value (lightness and darkness).

Focus

Your sketches don’t have to represent a final result, but they should get you far enough so that you don’t have to make major layout adjustments later. When you feel like you’ve got it, clean up your wireframes and resync with stakeholders. Chances are, you’ll need to iterate before advancing. That’s OK though, because adjustments at this stage are still very easy to make.

Now is the time to focus on what the app is actually going to be in the most concrete and practical terms. Cut any features that aren’t necessary and scope the remaining features so that they’re atomic and realistic for the time available. You want to make sure that your initial ideas are reflective of a project that you can actually accomplish.

At this point, you might want to make a high fidelity mockup using Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other “pixel perfect” drawing tool. Personally, I prefer to skip Photoshop whenever I can and just start coding an HTML/CSS prototype using a framework like Bootstrap. Often my code prototypes end up becoming the real project, which saves time.

Rendering your ideas in more detail will shine a spotlight on any remaining areas of ambiguity. If there’s something in your initial sketches that wasn’t detailed enough, you’ll uncover those problems now. Iterate and repeat.

Critique

We live in a wonderful time where it’s easy to get opinions from other people. If your work is not confidential, you can use sites like Dribbble or the design critique sub-Reddit to solicit honest feedback. If your work is confidential, you can still probably get away with asking your peers or other designers that you trust and know personally.

Sites like Dribbble can help you fine tune your work through honest critique.

You may also want to resync with stakeholders once you have a high fidelity mockup, just to make sure that everything was transferred from sketches as envisioned. If you’ve been communicating at the previous phases, colors, fonts, and copy should make up the majority of the changes. Layout changes can occur at this point, but they’ll take much longer than they should, so do your best to finalize the layouts sooner rather than later.

You may also want to start conducting simple usability tests using your prototypes to ensure that you’re still on the right track. Usability Foundations on Treehouse can help you with this.

You’ve probably noticed by now, but you should make sure you iterate at every phase of the design process as well. Iterating isn’t a step. Rather, it’s a pervasive aspect of any workflow. Your ideas will morph and change no matter what, so make those changes in the most efficient way possible.

Deliver

A project is no good unless it actually gets delivered to the people that use it. Many projects end up in limbo where designs change over and over. You can circumvent these issues by setting deadlines and milestones for every phase of the process. When does the client need to settle on a page layout? When should there be no more features added? When should a release candidate be ready for bug testing (and bug testing only, not feature changes)? It varies for every project and scenario, but it’s important to make sure that measurable progress is being made. If the project seems to be stuck at a phase for too long, it’s time to step back and figure out why.

A nice service that can help make sure you’re ready for launch is Lauchlist. The free version can help you get started, and if you use Launchlist a lot they have paid features that can take you further.

Speeding up your design process and staying focused is easier said than done. If you have any additional tips that I’ve left out here, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

The post Optimize Your Design Process appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The present is always the best time to take a step back and analyze your design process, because there’s nothing more valuable than your limited time on this planet. Could you spend your time making a bigger impact? Are you getting bogged down in details that don’t matter? How can you use your time more wisely?

Time is precious. Don’t waste it! – Photo from Flickr user Neal Fowler.

If you have a good design process, you’ll create better design and more of it (which should also mean more money). These tips are mostly applicable to designers, but developers can certainly benefit as well. Let’s dig in.

Understand

The most important step in any design process is to understand the problem. In this early phase, you should spend most of your time talking to your stakeholders (whether that’s a client, your boss, or yourself). Time spent understanding the problem will save massive amounts of time later on, because the changes you make should be smaller. Iteration is inevitable, but making changes early is cheaper than changes made later on.

When speaking with clients, make sure your questions are centered on the user’s goals. Nobody opens a web app or a mobile app arbitrarily. Rather, they have some sort of goal in mind, even if it’s a subconscious goal. The user might want to book an appointment, browse the latest news, or learn a new skill. Push this line of questioning until both you and your stakeholders share a detailed understanding of the product’s role in the user’s life.

How to Freelance and How to Run a Web Design Business on Treehouse can help you understand more about how to work with clients.

Sketch

After you have a keen understanding of the user’s goals, it’s time to start putting ideas into visuals. Designing in Photoshop, Illustrator, and other similar tools can take a tremendous amount of time because they’re more detail than you need (at first). Even a wireframing tool like Balsamiq Mockups or Omnigraffle might be overkill.

An example of a wireframe mockup created in Balsamiq Mockups.

The best way to start rendering visuals is with a simple drawing tool. I prefer a writing utensil and paper, but a simple sketching app for a tablet can work as well. As long as it’s fast and cheap for you to try ideas. At this point, you should mostly focus on fundamental shapes and composition. Create the rough outline for each page element and then place them together. The most important elements should be emphasized through any combination of unique shape, increased size, or contrast of value (lightness and darkness).

Focus

Your sketches don’t have to represent a final result, but they should get you far enough so that you don’t have to make major layout adjustments later. When you feel like you’ve got it, clean up your wireframes and resync with stakeholders. Chances are, you’ll need to iterate before advancing. That’s OK though, because adjustments at this stage are still very easy to make.

Now is the time to focus on what the app is actually going to be in the most concrete and practical terms. Cut any features that aren’t necessary and scope the remaining features so that they’re atomic and realistic for the time available. You want to make sure that your initial ideas are reflective of a project that you can actually accomplish.

At this point, you might want to make a high fidelity mockup using Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other “pixel perfect” drawing tool. Personally, I prefer to skip Photoshop whenever I can and just start coding an HTML/CSS prototype using a framework like Bootstrap. Often my code prototypes end up becoming the real project, which saves time.

Rendering your ideas in more detail will shine a spotlight on any remaining areas of ambiguity. If there’s something in your initial sketches that wasn’t detailed enough, you’ll uncover those problems now. Iterate and repeat.

Critique

We live in a wonderful time where it’s easy to get opinions from other people. If your work is not confidential, you can use sites like Dribbble or the design critique sub-Reddit to solicit honest feedback. If your work is confidential, you can still probably get away with asking your peers or other designers that you trust and know personally.

Sites like Dribbble can help you fine tune your work through honest critique.

You may also want to resync with stakeholders once you have a high fidelity mockup, just to make sure that everything was transferred from sketches as envisioned. If you’ve been communicating at the previous phases, colors, fonts, and copy should make up the majority of the changes. Layout changes can occur at this point, but they’ll take much longer than they should, so do your best to finalize the layouts sooner rather than later.

You may also want to start conducting simple usability tests using your prototypes to ensure that you’re still on the right track. Usability Foundations on Treehouse can help you with this.

You’ve probably noticed by now, but you should make sure you iterate at every phase of the design process as well. Iterating isn’t a step. Rather, it’s a pervasive aspect of any workflow. Your ideas will morph and change no matter what, so make those changes in the most efficient way possible.

Deliver

A project is no good unless it actually gets delivered to the people that use it. Many projects end up in limbo where designs change over and over. You can circumvent these issues by setting deadlines and milestones for every phase of the process. When does the client need to settle on a page layout? When should there be no more features added? When should a release candidate be ready for bug testing (and bug testing only, not feature changes)? It varies for every project and scenario, but it’s important to make sure that measurable progress is being made. If the project seems to be stuck at a phase for too long, it’s time to step back and figure out why.

A nice service that can help make sure you’re ready for launch is Lauchlist. The free version can help you get started, and if you use Launchlist a lot they have paid features that can take you further.

Speeding up your design process and staying focused is easier said than done. If you have any additional tips that I’ve left out here, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

The post Optimize Your Design Process appeared first on Treehouse Blog.