Update
We’re moving across the street to Texas Coworking as Buffalo Billiards has another event scheduled on Tuesday.
If you’re interested in presenting, you need to e-mail me by noon on Tuesday so I know how many people will want to speak. After the meeting, we’ll head downstairs to B.D. Riley’s pub for networking.
Given the proximity of this meeting to SXSW, we’re going to try something different. Anyone who has a panel at SXSW 2010 will be welcome to present a shortened version of their presentation. This allows the presenters a chance to run through their work in front of an audience and gain feedback as well as ensure that people who can’t make it to SXSW can learn from their. Even if you are going to SXSW this year, I highly recommend you join. Odds are good that you’ll be double-booked for many time slots, so why not get a taste for the panels that are of interest prior to the big event?
This is also a great time to meet other Austin Refreshers before the big event.
RSVP on Facebook
Bonus! Don’t forget about the Refresh Lunch the Friday of SXSWi.
Refresh Lunch on Facebook
Contact Alex if you would like to do a short version of your SXSW panel at the March meeting.
Tags: Events, meeting, SXSW
NOTE: The Scalable CSS Solutions panel has been postponed, which gives us more time to dive deep into the funding/acquisition panel.
In our second meeting of the year we are diving into the business side with a panel discussing how you can get funding for your project or be acquired and then we’ll shift over to a presentation on Object-Oriented CSS and CSS frameworks. Both presentations are lined up to be informative and fun. Hope you can join us!
Event Details
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, February 9th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
How to Get Funded or Get Acquired
A Panel with:
If you build apps, you should hopefully expect to get paid for them. If you’d rather focus on building than selling, this panel will help you learn the ins and outs of either getting funded or getting acquired by someone who can worry about the money part. Get perspectives from those who have found funding, funded, or acquired startups to help you wrap your brain around how to make your hard work pay off.
Scalable CSS Solutions
Are you finding it difficult to scale your CSS as you add features to your web application? Do you want to empower more people to be able to construct web pages on your growing content team? I’m going to walk through a way of breaking down the problems most websites and web application run into when needing to scale production, as well as various solutions to add much needed modularization and predictability to your markup and CSS. We’ll take a look at SASS and some of its implementations, OOCSS, rolling your own pre-processing, and other concepts to balance semantics with extensibility.
Tags: acquired, business, css, funding
I’ll skip the top ten lists and rehashing last year – it’s time to look forward and I’m psyched about what January and the rest of 2010 has in store for Refresh. So let’s hit it.
Event Details
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, January 12th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Texas Coworking 200 E. 6th Street (3rd Floor of the Hannig Row Building)
IMPORTANT UPDATE The location has changed to Texas Coworking, which is across the street from Buffalo Billiards and directly above B.D. Riley’s Pub.
weLost™: A Case Study/Discussion of a Hybrid iPhone/Web/REST App
Presented by Andrew W. Donoho
Our team released weLost™, our iPhone app, and its accompanying social weight loss network to the iTunes App Store in late December 2009. This hybrid app is both a native code and web application. I’ll be describing the high level choices we made in creating the app and social network.
What’s in Store for Refresh Austin in 2010
Presented by Alex Jones
We’re a dynamic group that has built a solid foundation that allows us to help each other improve on many levels, which is the only way we can truly judge our success. While our membership has grown significantly and attendance has steadily increased over the last few years, we’re not going to rest. Just like you, Refresh Austin is constantly improving and 2010 is shaping up to be a pivotal year. I’ll review the plans that we have for the next year and we’ll open up the majority of the time for discussion for what you would like to see out of the group.
Tags: development, iphone, meeting, web development
Howdy everyone!
It’s time for the Second Annual Refresh Austin / Austin on Rails party and this time the fine folks of WordPress Austin will join us as co-hosts. Even better, the first 100 people to join us at the party will get a free drink thanks to our neighbor Rackspace (they’re right down the road in San Antonio).
There’s a lot of overlap between our groups, so this is a great opportunity to catch up with friends you may not have seen in a while as well as meet new people as passionate about the Web and technology as we are.
This is a great chance to reflect on what we’ve accomplished in 2009 and to hatch plans for the year to come.
Food Drive
To give back to the Austin community, please bring at least one non-perishable food item to the Austin on Rails/Refresh Austin/Wordpress Austin Holiday party. Cash donations for CAFB will also be accepted.
While not required, it would be helpful if you could RSVP on Facebook so we know how many people are coming.
Event Details
7:00 – 10:00p.m. Tuesday, December 8th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
We’ll be upstairs at Buffalo Billiards (top of the stairs, take a right) and we’ll have a bartender, so it should be more convenient to snag a tasty beverage. That said, as we don’t raise money, you’ll have to cover your own tab (beyond the first free drink from Rackspace if you’re one of the first 100).
Tags: Austin on Rails, event, party, wordpress austin
Event Details
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, November 10th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Building Add-ons for Firefox and Fennec
Presented by Mark Phillip
We all use add-ons, but how is it to actually build one? A heck of a lot easier than you think. With an install base 10 times the size of the iPhone, a codebase that’s child’s play to any web developer, and a barrier-less approval process, it’s a puzzlingly underutilized app platform.
We’ll walk through how to build add-ons for Firefox, as well as for Fennec, Mozilla’s upcoming mobile browser, and there’ll be sample code at the end to help you get started.
Tags: extensions, fennec, firefox, meeting
Event Details
7:00 – 9:00p.m. October 13th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
CiviCRM: The Benefactress and the Diva
Presented by Diana M. Dupuis
CiviCRM is an open source, web-based, constituent relationship management application. Predominantly used by advocacy and non-profit groups, Civi can track contact data, enable memberships and donations, organize constituent groups, manage events, and make communication more effective. Although there is a standalone version, Civi is more commonly integrated into a Drupal or Joomla CMS installation. This is not an “upload and install” application, most clients will need the help of a developer (and designer) to get good results from this feature-rich tool. This month, I’ll present some of Civi’s benefits and offer suggestions for the care and feeding of it’s sometimes quirky and complicated diva aspects.
Wordami — A Simple JavaScript Game
Presented by Kyle Simpson
I’m going to present a JavaScript based game that I’ve been working on, which I’m calling Wordami. It’s a twist on a Nintendo game called Wordtris, which is Tetris-like game, but which uses letters on the tiles to spell words. Wordami takes a slightly different, more fun/challenging approach, where you must spell words from a given list by rotating falling game pieces to line up letters.
The game is built using JavaScript, heavily relying on jQuery, and uses simple rendering techniques so it can work in virtually any browser (no “Canvas” required!). It currently runs completely in-browser, but may eventually evolve to have a server component for score tracking, multi-player, etc.
I will demo the game (and let the audience play on their laptops/phones if they want, so bring a device and have fun!). Then, we’ll run through several topics relating to making the game, including:
- Game play design
- Game mechanics
- HTML/CSS for rendering
- JavaScript/jQuery code
See you on the 13th!
No tag for this post.
Event Details
7:00 – 9:00p.m. August 11th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Drupal – An Introduction
Presenter: Lauren Roth
The days are long gone when the height of sophistication in web development and design was applying a style sheet to your static HTML. You could instead hand code a custom web application to serve your content, but not have an easy way for your client to log in and change content themselves. Along came blogs and with blogs, and more sophisticated client-side scripting, dynamically loaded content. A powerfully flexible way to organize large amounts of content is to use a Content Management System like Drupal.
So, what is Drupal? You may have heard of it. You may have tried Wordpress and considered it a lightweight CMS. You may have also tried Joomla! Drupal is a content management system, written in PHP, which can be used to build websites as simple as blogs or as complex as full-scale community sites. You can use its abundance of community contributed modules toward building a web publishing platform, a social application, or a even a magazine like The Economist, which is currently being converted to Drupal.
Documentation as Conversation
Presenter: Anne Gentle
Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well or learn something new as if they were in a classroom with a community for classmates. This talk describes how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, with the help of social media technology. I’ll discuss the topics in my new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. I’ll describe the use of in-person Book Sprints that combine wikis and community events to gather together writers to accomplish documentation goals.
Tags: Events, meeting
Event Details
7:00 – 9:00p.m. July 14th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
An Overview of Usability
The newly restarted Austin chapter of the Usability Professionals Association will present on Usability and how it fits into business and development processes. There will be a brief overview of usability followed by an open discussion where we will take audience questions, share strategies, and learn from each other.
Demo Slots
We’re going to try a small experiment during this meeting – giving two members a chance to demo their product and gather feedback from other members. Each demo will last up to 5 minutes and will be followed by 10 minutes for questions and suggestions. The key here is that you’ll have a chance to gather the thoughts and ideas of your colleagues, this isn’t a pitch session.
Interested in presenting? E-mail me off list with the name of the product and the type of feedback you are seeking and we’ll set things up. If you can’t demo during this meeting, don’t worry, if we get a lot of responses we’ll use this format for a longer meeting.
Books
We will also have a couple of books to give away courtesy of O’Reilly and Peachpit.
Tags: event, meeting, usability, web design
7:00 p.m. – 9 p.m. May 12th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Prototyping for Designers
Today’s web offers more interactivity than ever, but this poses new challenges for designers. How can we prototype without being ace coders? I will discuss some easy ways designers can move beyond traditional wireframes to prototype and communicate interactivity.
Rob Jones runs his own UI consultancy here in Austin Texas
Tool Roundup
This is a chance for anyone and everyone to brag on their favorite tools, share a tip or reveal that secret weapon that takes a project from good to great. Anyone who is interested will have five minutes to show off an app, service, tool, plugin or method that they think others would find useful. The tools can be for developing, designing, writing or running a small business.
If you’re interested in reserving a spot, drop me a note off list with the name of the tool or service you want to talk about. We’ll also open it up to the group during the meeting for everyone to share.
No tag for this post.
7:00 p.m. April 14th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Productive Creativity: How to Boost Your Creativity, Your Business
and Your Life
Many believe that either you’re born creative or you aren’t. And, some creative abilities may well be biological. Even so, research offers information and techniques to improve anyone’s creativity. This
presentation will help you nurture your inner Edison, Picasso, Oprah or Bill Gates. Presenter Olivia Wakeman, has decades of experience in creative fields, including work with Burson-Marsteller New York, the largest PR firm in the world and McCann-Erickson, one of the top ten advertising agencies.
ExpressionEngine Road Test
Why is it that many top design firms choose a CMS with a paid license, when there are plenty of high-quality free alternatives? Let us introduce you to ExpressionEngine.
In this get-our-hands-dirty demo we’ll take an in-depth look at ExpressionEngine’s feature set, compare it to other popular CMSs, and even build-out a quick application. By the end of the show, you’ll see why EE is the preferred tool for the web designer.
INTRO (20 min)
What’s ExpressionEngine?
What are its strengths/weaknesses?
How does it compare to WordPress/Joomla/Drupal/etc.?
DEMO (20 min)
Installation and set-up
Approaching a project
Building templates with weblogs
Pushing the envelope with plugins, extensions, and modules
Q & A (20 min)
Tags: cms, creativity, ee, expression engine, PHP, web development
