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

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How to Get Funded or Get Acquired

A Panel with:

• Jason Cohen, founder of SmartBear Software
• Pat Condon, founder of Rackspace Hosting
• Jim Curry, VP of Corporate Development, Rackspace Hosting
• Josh Baer, founder of OtherInbox

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

Presented by Ryan Joy

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.

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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.

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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.

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7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, November 10th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

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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.

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7:00 – 9:00p.m. October 13th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

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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

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See you on the 13th!

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.

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