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.
…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.
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, May 11th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
Sheila, (one of our most popular presenters) returns to help you navigate requests for free consultations from friends, associates and strangers.
Legal Issues for Early Stage Startups provides highlights of some of the major stumbling blocks and issues for early stage startups. Issues include when to incorporate and types of entities, types of intellectual property protection, and use of third party consultants.
7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, April 13th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
All the technology in the world doesn’t change human needs. In this talk, business analyst & social-media pro Tim Walker will combine a little history, a little management theory, and a lot of common-sense business experience to help you rethink how to deliver maximum value to your users.
CSS3 is upon us. Modern browsers are advancing and gaining the ability to replicate with a few lines of CSS what used to be only possible in Flash and Javascript. We’ll take a look at Webkit’s brand new CSS Transition property and learn how to use it and, more importantly, how to use it wisely.
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.
This week’s Refresh Roundup is a little late because I was in the Houston area over the weekend enjoying time with the family, especially my ridiculously cute niece.
That’s it for this week.
That’s it for this week! If I’ve missed anything, post it in the comments.
Presenter: Alex Jones
This month’s meeting is all about clients. Whether you are a freelancer, at an agency or work in-house at a large corporation, you work for and with clients day in and day out. So, the first half of the meeting will discuss common client needs and expectations and how to create the best atmosphere possible for successful projects and relationships. Striking a balance that satisfies both sides of the equation takes a little bit of work up front, but pays huge dividends over time.
The second half of the meeting will be a Client Tip Roundup, which will consist of five to seven Refreshers sharing their tips, and tricks of client management.
We’re going to try something different this meeting to mix up the format and hopefully make it a little easier for those of us who aren’t seasoned presenters. Rather than have one person speak for the entire hour and a half or more, we’re going to have 1-3 micro-presentations that run from 30 mins to an hour (depending on number who present). This should help our presenters to be able to distill their information into a manageable time-chunk while also offering the attendees multiple sources of insight. Each presentation should fit nicely into the overall theme.
Usability, Design & E-commerce, presented by David Lee
Everything Before the Cart, presented by David Nunez
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.