We are a community of Web professionals refreshing the creative, technical and professional culture of our craft.
Hi everyone, we’ve been bumped from our normal meeting spot, and our backup location won’t be able to host us this month, so we’re going to change gears. While we won’t have a good venue for topics, we still want to gather and socialize, so please join us at the Gingerman Tuesday evening to meet up, geek out and enjoy a bit of beer.
We’ll return to topic-focused meetings for the September 13th Refresh.
If you’ve seen Sara’s earlier presentations at Refresh you’re likely as excited as I am that she’ll be up on stage sharing her experience and approach to sketching and prototyping. While the focus may sound design-oriented, Developers, writers, marketing folks and entrepreneurs alike will all benefit from this presentation. This presentation will run longer than our normal topics, so we’ll focus the entire meeting on it and ensure there’s plenty of timed during and after the presentation to explore the possibilities.
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, June 14th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome).
Process. Everyone has it, but not everyone has the chance to make award winning, wildly successful products people can’t stop talking about. We drudge through tight deadlines, organizational missteps, endless revisions and bug fix cues, and constant pressure to ‘get it right’.. But how do we know what the right experience is if we’re not sketching, experimenting and testing the possibilities?
Together we’ll learn how to summons the brightest ideas, prototype through problems and examine ways to stitch innovation into the product development process. Then, transfer our insights into powerful, collaborative concepts to share and test with clients, teammates and users alike.
Sara is a User Experience Evangelist for Microsoft who lives for big ideas, changing everything, breaking your toys and capturing new ideas.
Have you checked out the new Refresh Austin Facebook page yet?
Howdy everyone, we have two great topics this month that will get your mind working and provide great ideas that you can put into practice.
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, May 10th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Let us know you’re coming! RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome). While you’re at it, check out the new Refresh Austin Facebook page!
Most of us probably agree that getting user feedback is important, yet why do many of our projects go without it? Judd will explore combining techniques and online tools that can help you drive improvements to your site/app.
Among the topics covered will be:
Sure it’s easy to add a Like button to your website but what do you do with it once it’s there? How can you use Facebook Login to make registration for your site easier and get more user information all at the same time? What kind of data can you mine out of Facebook OpenGraph? In this presentation, I’ll take everyone a step beyond the basics of Facebook’s social plugins and demonstrate how to use the more advanced features of the Facebook platform and give everyone a glimpse of how much data is really there to be had and used.
…and we’re back from South-by with two great topics!
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, April 12th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
So your client asks you for a mobile app that needs to run Android and iPhone. While both platforms have their strengths, designing and deploying for both can be a challenge: The development environments are very different, and their interface patterns are different enough to require different interaction design. On a lot of client budgets (and for design shops that have traditional web dev backgrounds), this can be troublesome.
To solve this problem, mobile frameworks based on traditional web technologies such as HTML/Javascript have emerged. We’ll take a brief tour of Sencha Touch and jQuery mobile, two frameworks that allow you to build cross-platform apps. (As an added bonus, we’ll look at how designers can theme Sencha Touch using LESS/CSS).
We’ll also take a brief look at how you can use Phonegap to get your apps ready for the various app stores.
Be entertained as Elizabeth Quintanilla shares her unique approach to tech, business and social media. Learn her distinct point of view of “Social Business” and learn about a valuable concept that should be in every tech, entrepreneurs, biz leaders, analysts, and marketers toolkit. Learn why all of us now wear multiple hats such as customer support, PR, marketing, and more in this current environment of Social Media. Remember Social Business helps you get smarter not harder while (if well implemented) more effective.
The crisp air and the little packs of costumed kids running around means we’re heading into the home stretch for the year. November will be our last topic-based meeting for 2010, and we have two very interesting subjects that I think you’ll want to join us for.
Important Note: We’re meeting at Spider House this month! We will not meet at Buffalo Billiards this month due to a conflict, but we’re actively working on a spot for the meeting and will post it as soon as it’s set.
7:00 – 9:00, Tuesday, November 9th
Location: Spider House
There’s everyday evil…and then there’s the heinous evil known as Marketing. Online and offline marketers scheme to manipulate your thoughts and behavior in ways you scarcely comprehend. But you’re too smart for that, right? Maybe not. This talk will tour the twisted mind of a Sith-lord marketer and ask how those powers might be used for good instead of evil.
We know that the Internet can be used to donate to political candidates. Or make fun of them. But, with a little help from citizens, it can also make government work better. First, we’ll look at a handful of sites that aggregate government data and present it in useful ways. Then we’ll explore the process of distilling government data dumps and APIs to build our own sites.
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, October 12th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
If you work with JavaScript and aren’t already using templates, you should start! The syntax is simple and the organization and maintainability advantages are huge. If your application uses XHRs to update the page, if you write plugins, or if you’re trying to minimize the markup in your app that’s generated on both the client and server, templates can help there, too. This talk will cover the basic syntax of one engine, jQuery templates, and give some examples of templates in use.
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, July 13th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
It’s time once again for one of our most popular topics – the Refresh Tool Roundup. Unlike most meetings, we divide this one into 5 minute segments to give you the chance to brag on your 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, running a small business or maintaining your sanity.
In no particular order…
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';document.designMode='on';We have 15 slots available, so if you're interested in presenting, contact Alex and he'll put you on the agenda.
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!
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, February 9th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, November 10th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
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.
We get together on the second Tuesday of each month, from 7pm - 9pm. Most meetings are downtown at Buffalo Billiards, but check this site or the mailing list for full details as it occasionally changes.
Informal gatherings, arranged on the list or via Twitter often pop up too.
Already on the mailing list, but you'd like to do more? We're always looking for speakers, so drop us a line if you have a presentation in mind!
We love to hear ideas for improving Refresh Austin and happily welcome those who want to volunteer to help.
We don't take a lot of sponsorships, but we do have a few opportunities for the right fit.