Thursday, Dec 4, 2008
6:30 - 8:00pm
Steve Champeon and Matt Henry of Hesketh.com will give a brief overview of Progressive Enhancement and then will bring us up to date on how it’s being affected/transformed by Web 2.0 and interactive Web applications.
Location:
Pilot Mill Building
1101 Haynes Street
Suite 109
Raleigh, NC 27604
Thursday, Oct 23, 2008
6:30 - 8:00pm
Clinton Nixon, senior developer at Viget Labs, will present and facilitate this talk about how to avoid trivial, repetitive tasks and increase your productivity with your computer. We’ll cover both software you already have, and free/cheap software you might not. If you’ve got a tip of your own, bring it! We’ll have some free time to share at the end.
Location:
Carrboro Creative Coworking
205 Lloyd Street, Suite 101
Carrboro, NC 27510
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
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.
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.
215 William Penn Plaza, Durham 27704 — Thurs, Jul 31, 2008, 6:30-8:00PM
As we’re trying to do once each quarter, we’ll take a break from the formal presentations this month to have a group share. We’ll take 30-45 minutes to geek out on some of the latest web industry news and share some personal favorites, valuable secrets, tips, tools, or whatever you feel could benefit the group.
Come ready to share anything you’d like — a headline or news item, a site, a tool, a snippet of code, a device, a book excerpt — anything large or small that you feel is current and elevates our web knowledge. And don’t think it has to be entirely unique (as in no one else knows about it already), it’ll kill the vibe. Just come with something that you know has been valuable/noteworthy to you, and don’t over-think it. It can be as quick as sharing a URL and a sentence about why we should visit the site. Or it can be as long as 5 minutes in a text editor demonstrating a few lines of code.
So stop for a few minutes before you head out and think of something to share. Do that, come relaxed, and the results will be sweet. See you there.
Independence Park Apartments
(mini-movie theater!)
215 William Penn Plaza
Durham NC, 27704
Location: Durham, NC — Thurs, June 26, 2008, 6:30-8:00PM
In this virtual presentation, Jared M. Spool, User Interface Engineering’s Founder, will discuss UIE’s recent usability research into how people perceive brands on the internet and how teams can ensure their designs strengthen each user’s relationship with the brand. You will learn:
In his presentation, Jared will show how Amazon, Walmart, Ford, Apple, and Netflix have attempted to increase their users’ brand engagement.
American Tobacco Campus
Teach for America Offices
Washington Building, Bay 12
Suite 1120
Durham, NC 27701
(Map)
Refresh 007 was a big hit! Stuart Halloway was highly engaging and his presentation, “Ending Legacy Code in Our Lifetime,” gave everyone lots to talk about - not just the developers, but the designers and “others,” too. Stuart’s slides are available, and I know of at least one recap of the event.
Many thanks to Stuart for being our speaker. We’re also grateful to the West End Wine Bar - they let us have their downstairs, The Cellar, all to ourselves at no charge. The ceilings were low, but the vibe was great. I think everyone had a lot of fun.
Photos are on flickr. See you next month!
Location: The Cellar — Thurs, May 22, 2008, 6:30-8:00PM
Most software developers don’t have an exact definition of legacy code, but to paraphrase Potter Stewart, they “know it when they see it.” Unfortunately, legacy code has something else in common with Stewart’s famous subject — it is embarrassingly ubiquitous.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Stuart Halloway, CEO of Relevance, will share:
Agility can be done right. By respecting the dynamic, living nature of software/human systems, you can create systems that evolve to meet changing needs.
The Cellar (downstairs at The West End Wine Bar)
450 W. Franklin St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
Refresh 006 was a major success. Nathan Huening from OnWired gave a great talk called “Dr. jQuery (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM),” and his passion for the material was evident. In a series of increasingly complex examples, Nathan showed off the power and simplicity of the jQuery JavaScript library. He demonstrated that most of jQuery can be reduced to “grab things, do stuff,” starting with simple CSS modifications and moving to AJAX, animation, and custom functionality.
To get a good taste of the presentation, you can use FireBug to run Nathan’s sample code against the demo page he set up. You’ll want to be running FireFox 2, as FF3 Beta 5 gave me a lot of grief while I tried to follow Nathan’s examples.
Big thanks to Nathan and to Duke’s Blackwell Interactive for hosting the event, as well as to everyone who came out; maybe we’ve got you pictured on our Flickr page.
Hope to see you next month.
Durham, NC — Thurs, Apr 24, 2008, 6:30-8:00PM
The web isn’t what it used to be: with advanced browsers and powerful Javascript frameworks like jQuery, websites deliver user experiences that rival those of traditional desktop software. Nathan Huening, Director of Web Development at OnWired, will share the nuts and bolts of jQuery and how you can use it to build rich, professional interfaces. It’s easy! No programming experience required ... and feel free to bring your laptop since you can expect live, hands-on examples. To participate, you’ll need a copy of Firefox with the Firebug extension installed.
Blackwell Interactive
Duke Office of Information Technology
334 Blackwell Street
(American Tobacco Campus)
Durham, NC 27701
The laid back, free-form approach to the meeting was sincerely enjoyable and on spot. Thanks to Ogilvy and specifically to Callie, Noah, Chris, and Kendall for making it all happen. If you missed the meeting but have the chance later, make a reason to head over to Ogilvy for a visit — awesome people, immaculate space, and a ton of engaging work. There was no lack of sharing either — thanks to everyone for being plugged in and willing to speak up. If you’re looking to catch up on what went on, here’s the flow:
See you next month, and thanks for blogging, tweeting, etc about Refresh the Triangle. The word’s getting out and cool things are happening.
Durham, NC — Thurs, Mar 27, 2008, 6:30-8:00PM
For various reasons, we’ll take a break from the formal presentations this month. Come on out to Ogilvy where we’ll socialize a bit more than usual, eat, drink, and share. Share what? We’ll take 30-45 minutes to geek out on some of the latest web industry news and share some personal favorites, well kept secrets, tips, tools, or whatever you feel could benefit the group.
Come ready to share anything you’d like — a headline or news item, a site, a tool, a snippet of code, a device, a book excerpt — anything large or small that you feel is current and elevates our web knowledge. And don’t think it has to be entirely unique (as in no one else knows about it already), it’ll kill the vibe. Just come with something that you know has been valuable/noteworthy to you, and don’t over-think it. It can be as quick as sharing a URL and a sentence about why we should visit the site. Or it can be as long as 5 minutes in a text editor demonstrating a few lines of code.
So stop for a few minutes before you head out and think of something to share. Do that, come relaxed, and the results will be sweet. See you there.
Ogilvy
115 North Duke Street
Durham, NC 27701
Durham, NC — Thurs, Feb 28, 2008, 6:30-8:00PM
Great design requires every design decision to be rationalized and justified. Explore the design process of great designers and discover tools and techniques to justify your own work.
Rob Goodlatte is an award-winning interactive designer and developer. Currently an undergraduate at Duke, his short design career has included work for Disney, Microsoft, and Stanford University. After graduation, he will be joining Facebook as a product designer.
iContact
2635 Meridian Parkway
Durham, NC 27713
Last night we gathered at Bronto’s inspiring office for our first “Lightning Sessions” meeting. If you missed it, you should check out the flickr photos and Wayne’s video. Attendance was awesome as the Refresh momentum continues to build - we had about 35 people come out. The Lightning Sessions approach was successful - presentation links are below. We hope to do Lightning Sessions about 4 times per year, but we have some ideas for improving the model next time around.
Our presenters were highly prepared and I think everyone left with something new to think about, but next time we’ll aim for more spontaneity and fewer bullet points (in fact, maybe no slides!), with the goal of making the night a bit more interactive. Lightning Sessions should be distinct from a typical presentation style and ideally, people would do demos and live coding. If anyone has input on these ideas, please comment. We’re open to suggestions. Thanks again to the presenters last night.
Wayne Sutton: Twitter for Fun and Profit
Patrick Reagan: How’s Haml?
Josh Vickery: Simple Gimp
Peyton Crump: Google Map API Tutorial Primer
Julia Kulla-Mader: Evaluating Drupal
And big thanks again to Bronto for hosting the meeting. The food and beverages were great, but the t-shirts and traveling brontos were even better. Any ideas for upcoming speakers or topics? Know of a company that might like to sponsor? Let us know! Thanks again to everyone for coming out.