Update 2011 detail: content drawers
The latest addition to the site are the content drawers.
Initially, the site was meant to provide a means of quickly getting a feel for the conference. It was a summary.
As we near the date of the conference, it's important to evolve the site by adding details about our plans (and this is quite organic since, as we near the conference date, our plans are gaining fidelity). I wanted to include the content in a manner that felt natural to the feel of the site and – after several design iterations – ended up with the content drawers.
I'm not 100% percent happy with the implementation yet and will be working on the site this weekend to refine it. However, there are a few considerations that have already been implemented. For example, you can still swipe left/right when the content drawer is open and, since the content can vary in height, the drawers will automatically adjust in size to accomodate.
Also, the site will animate to the top of the panel that you've swiped to so you can start reading that panel from the top. There are a couple of issues with timings on these that I'm working on fixing and currently it can grapple with you a bit if you start scrolling vertically before it has had a chance to animate to the top. This will be fixed in the next iteration.