Often going by the nickname “Hondo”, Matthew Crist is an innovative user experience developer at Cantina with a passion for good design and simplicity.
Matthew enjoys working across the entire range of user experience from conception and design to efficient development during implementation. He has been helping companies craft solutions to their online interaction challenges for over ten years.
During his time as a consultant, he has worked with companies large and small such as Macy’s, Limited Brands, Rue La La and EH Publishing.
Most recently, he has developed a strong passion for creating simple solutions to the new challenges that are brought about by our new touch enabled device overlords.
Without customers, web applications are doomed for failure. We tend to think of the users of your applications as, well, users. We should however treat them as customers. Projects have success metrics, and a lot of these metrics are based on customer interactions. These metrics may include something tangible like the amount of sales of [...]
How we interact with the web is changing on a daily basis. Mobile browsing usage is increasing dramatically and will someday overtake non-mobile browsing as the primary communication between you and your customers. This is one reason why responsive design is becoming a best practice in web app development. Getting started with responsive design requires [...]
When I first started developing websites back in the mid to late 90s, we were focused on getting our websites to look their best in a singular browser. Depending on your preference it was either Netscape or Internet Explorer. If you were lucky, the site might look fine in both, but we all ran across [...]
The concepts behind responsive design have been around for a little while now, but it’s only now gaining traction amongst bigger organizations. Today, one more large organization can be added to the list of those supporting responsiveness. The Boston Globe launched a new and revamped site utilizing a responsive design created by the teams at [...]
User experience design (UX) matters a lot to us at Cantina. A great user experience will magnify a successful technology implementation, while a bad user experience can turn success into disappointment. As one of Cantina’s UX experts I am often asked about learning resources for those who are starting out or wanting to learn more [...]
Recently, Dan Adams and I had the opportunity to go learn about Brightcove’s new product called App Cloud at their Developer Kitchen. App Cloud is a set of tools that will allow you to build native mobile apps using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript along with their service.
I’ve often been annoyed by inner scrollbars on a website. As a user/customer, I shouldn’t be required to scroll twice just to view the content that I want to consume. Thankfully, with the rise in tablets and the forthcoming release of OS X Lion, we have a new weapon in the fight against inner scroll [...]
Organizations have options when developing mobile apps; the most significant choice is whether to develop native apps for specific phone OS’s (iOS, Android, Symbian) or to develop HTML5 web apps. Since native apps have more direct access to the phone’s hardware they can be more powerful, but there are also advantages to developing web apps. [...]
Web developers have long possessed a deep understanding of the box models that are implemented by web browsers. We know the ins and outs of each one and can help you with your float bugs and double margins with ease. Thankfully, with CSS3 and the flexible box model, working with layouts is on track to [...]
Last week, Adobe released a tool for converting Flash to HTML5 called Wallaby. Because we’ve been playing around with mobile web apps I was interested to give it a shot, so I created a very simple test on which to compare. I started by creating the simplest flash movie that I knew how, which is [...]
Several market trends have been shaping the mobile services we offer at Cantina. The use of consumer technologies in the enterprise is increasing, including everything from Dropbox, social networks, Google apps, and mobile devices. Companies considering the deployment of business applications to the mobile context need to consider bring your own device (BYOD) strategies to [...]
