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Refresh 011 — DIY Hardware Based Authentication
Posted Aug 29, 2008 | 0 Comments | by pcrump
Thursday, Sep 25, 2008
6:30 - 8:00pm
Simon Brown has been a software developer for more years than he cares to admit, currently specializing in the development of large scale web applications. He will discuss the new, open, and inexpensive encryption hardware Yubikey. We’ll look at ways it can be combined with open source or your own software to put a new twist on the problems of authentication. Come along and learn how to integrate encrypted one-time-passwords into your next software project. Simon promises not to go too deeply into hardware or cryptography details ... unless someone asks.
Location:
Viget Labs
202 Rigsbee Ave, 2nd Floor
Durham, NC 27701
Filed under: Refresh Events
Refresh 010 Recap
Posted Aug 29, 2008 | 1 Comments | by pcrump
Last night’s Refresh on Social Design Patterns was both informative and thought-provoking. Jackson shared some brief but valuable history on design patterns in general, and then led us through some of the current thinking and examples surrounding social design patterns. One which raised a number of eyebrows was the “fake follow”, which looks to now be a reality rather than a discussion. Anti-Patterns were also a hot topic, and the follow-up discussion centered largely around many of the bad patterns that have been identified. There will be more resources to follow when Jackson is able to connect us to his slides, but in the meantime, check out Yahoo’s design pattern library or Chris Messina’s flickr collection of design patterns as general design pattern resources.
Thanks again to Jackson for preparing such an engaging presentation, and to Jeff and Calvert Holdings for being such amazing hosts and showing us such a good time.
Filed under: General Discussion
The Refresh Site and Brave Colours
Posted Aug 29, 2008 | 0 Comments | by pcrump
The Refresh site made it into Function’s post from a month or so ago on 32 Examples of Websites with a Brave Colour Scheme. Some cool examples in the article, check it out.
Filed under: General Discussion
Refresh 010 — Social Design Patterns
Posted Aug 25, 2008 | 0 Comments | by pcrump
August 28, 2008
6:30-8:00PM
Calvert Holdings, Inc.
1225 Crescent Green, Suite 115
Cary, North Carolina 27518
Jackson Fox, user experience designer at Viget Labs, shares:
These days it seems like every new site, and even venerable old sites, are embracing social features. We have dozens of friends lists, more inboxes than we can count, libraries of avatars, and everything can be shared with anyone. In the process we’ve had to struggle with loss of privacy, new security challenges, and new forms of online etiquette.
As social software evolves, we’re starting to see emerging patterns of behavior and design. We’ll take a look at some of these emerging social design patterns, both good and bad, and look ahead at the patterns that we still need to create.
Filed under: Refresh Events
Refresh 009 Recap
Posted Aug 01, 2008 | 2 Comments | by Jackson Fox
This month’s Refresh the Triangle 009 was our quarterly show-and-tell meetup, where we geek out on some of the share interesting news, valuable secrets, hot tips, neat tools, or whatever else happens to pop into our heads.
Clinton Nixon kicked things off with a really-fast recap of OSCON 2008 where he gave a tutorial on building Rails plugins. He also recommended Douglas Crockford’s new book Javascript: The Good Parts.
Mindy Wagner shared two new sites she’s been using — PatternTap is a collection of web interface patterns and examples, and ScrnShots is a site for sharing and tagging screenshots. Both are great resources when you’re looking for some design inspiration, or if you’re interested in building out your own library of inspiring designs.
Casey was recently introduced to the prototyping tool Axure and gave us a tour of the kind of wireframes he’s been building with it. Axure lets you build interactive prototypes in a GUI designer, and then export those prototypes to HTML.
Casey also recommended SpringLoops, hosted Subversion service with some nice tools for deploying web apps and connecting to Basecamp, and IE Tester, a tool for running multiple IE versions. IE Testing lets you show versions side-by-side, but seems to be a bit rough around the edges still.
I attempted to demo the slick new user testing tool Silverback from Clearleft, but the projector refused to cooperate. Instead, I talked about using Ethnio and UserVue for remote usability testing, and demoed Balsamiq, a flash-based wireframing tool.
Following up on our Silverback discussion, Nathan talked about his new favorite screencasting tool - Screenflow. Screenflow does all the standard recording tricks, but also includes a decent video editor with effects for panning, zooming, and highlighting user actions.
Lastly, Michale Kimsal was nice enough to start our very own Refresh the Triangle room on FriendFeed.
Thanks everyone who came out and shared with us! You can check out photos from Refresh 009 on Flickr.
Filed under: Refresh Events