I apologize for not having any suggestions for you but I do have a quick question. Just out of curiosity, what would you consider cutting-edge in front-end development?
Good question. Some ideas from the last project I worked on:
- Incorporating physics/dynamics. I built a library to automatically adapt tween curves coded in javascript to physically-correct responses based on the velocity and acceleration prior to invoking the tween (I used automatic differentiation to handle that). I'd love to go further down that path.
- Constraint-based layout engines. Again, on this last project, we started playing with Cassowary, which is the automatic layout library Apple uses in Cocoa. Technically, Cassowary is a superset of what CSS layout can achieve. I'd love to spend more time seeing how that can improve dynamic layouts; for extra fun, combine with physics engine.
- Game UIs. I really like some of the UX idioms games use, and I'd like to see if/how regular apps can take advantage of those types of things.
- Losing the default 1:1 pixel-UI element mapping when it comes to event dispatch, which to me is a very mouse-centric design. This seems particularly important/useful to me to change when it comes to touch UIs.
- Spending a lot more time on gestural APIs and new touch-related UX idioms. We've only scratched the surface of what's possible with touch/multi-touch, and I'd really like to be involved with apps that are considered today to 'not be possible' on mobile devices.
- More mobile. I've moved to a completely mobile- and touch-first UX design approach, and that's definitely where the cutting edge is.
- Vastly more speed/low latency. I think we've stalled as an industry in terms of response times and latency. I'd love to work with a team that wanted to do the kinds of things you can only do if latency is very low, around the order of one or two frame response times at 60 fps.
Hope that helps! That's just off the top of my head, there's a lot of specific UX areas that do not have adequate solutions today that I'd like to tackle again on mobile/touch devices, that are probably possible today.
