009 Recap
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.