Psychic Origami

So last night I presented chrss to the people gathered for the inaugural £5 app meet. We had a reasonable number turn up - thanks to everyone who came along. I probably didn’t talk to everyone, but it was a good crowd.

As is fairly normal I did feel rather nervous before hand, but felt better once I got going. Pretty happy with how my presentation went. I maybe spoke for a bit longer than I’d planned (waffling a bit when it came to the technical side), but managed to field quite a few questions so worked well.

After my presentation, Ian talked about ShowMeDo. Ian focussed more on things like how to grow a community and that seemed to resonate well - sparking a fair bit of conversation. He did a really good job of getting across what he and Kyran had done to get ShowMeDo to the point it is now.

As well as the planned talks from Ian and myself we also had artwork on display from shardcore (including Edison and Topsy):

So all in all it went well. It will be interesting to see how this meetup progresses from here. The next one should be in about a month.

[edit: Ian's got a post up too: http://ianozsvald.com/2007/03/28/£5-app-great-inaugral-night/ ]

Well yesterday we actually went and looked at the venue for the £5 App meet. Lovely regency era house that’s being slowly renovated. Should prove to be an interesting place - just hope it’s not too chilly on the night.

In terms of presenting my talk on chrss I’ve been investigating the actual tech I’ll need. Not having powerpoint and running a mac has led me to the following:

• S5 for the presentation/powerpoint alternative
• Shiira for displaying the S5 presentation in true full-screen

S5 has the advantage of being “based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript”, so nothing new to learn there. Plus I can then easily have the slides online later.

Shiira is a Webkit based browser for OS X that I’m only really using for the full-screen functionality. As it’s basically using the same rendering engine as Safari it seems to work very well with S5.

Think I’ll be keeping the presentation fairly short. In general I’ll just touch on the overall idea behind chrss, then an overview and highlights of the underlying tech. I’ll probably tack on a “what next…” slide to discuss some of the features I might add later. That should bring it up to a reasonable duration, without getting bogged down in detail.

It’s now called the “£5 App Meet” (rather than the $5 app meet) and if you want to attend please go on over to http://upcoming.org/event/163252/ and sign up.

It’s being held at 13 Brunswick Square in Brighton on the 27th of March (which is a Tuesday). More details are available at http://upcoming.org/event/163252/.

We got Flickrd:

(at the sussex geek dinner)

It appears that I’m helping organise “$5 Apps - a new geek meet” with Ian. Should be interesting.

Planning on giving a talk about setting up chrss and Ian will be talking about ShowMeDo. With luck we’ll get a few other people along to talk about their “$5 apps” in the future.