Alumni Lecture: Peter McLachlan - The adaptive web: getting ready for the device landscape of 2015

There are over 1 billion smartphones in use worldwide and aggressive worldwide adoption continues with over 50% market penetration in the US.  Simultaneously there has been significant growth in the tablet market as well, with an estimated 137 million shipped by the end of 2012.  It is reasonable to expect wearable web-capable devices such as Google Glass and web-enabled television offerings from Apple and Google to enter mass market adoption by 2014.  Collectively these devices have wildly different display characteristics including screen sizes ranging from 1.5" to 60+" and pixel densities ranging from 60 PPI to over 200. 

Traditional approaches of creating siloed device-specific websites such as the typical "m-dot" websites we have seen in the past for mobile web do not scale to the variety of screen sizes and pixel densities that represent the future direction of the web landscape. 

In this talk we will discuss challenges these changes present for website and web application development, as well as philosophies and techniques for dealing with the presentation layer complexity including responsive design and adaptive technologies.

Peter McLachlan is a co-founder and the Chief Architect of Mobify.   His responsibilities there include product design & development, security and Mobify's digital infrastructure.  On sunny days, he leads workouts on Mobify’s rooftop patio. A graduate of UBC Computer Science, he studied data visualization with Tamara Munzner in Imager lab with a focus on visualization of large scale networking data and qualitative analysis of data visualization techniques.