Great Brighton based IT meet up – The £5 app

The £5 app is a meet-up for programmers, web developers and designers to discuss and showcase their “£5 apps” – lightweight software created by one or two people who take a simple idea and run with it.

The discussion will range from technical (what tools/languages were used during development) to business (building communities, spreading the word, costs and rewards).

Details at http://fivepoundapp.com/meetup/24/

Next meeting:-

Meetup: Spring

Wed 20th Apr 2011 at 8 p.m.

The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton

Well it appears we’re moving to a "seasonal" time-scale for the £5app. We’re still a little busy, but are hoping we’ll manage to keep things semi-regular.

So to awaken us fully into spring we’ve got three talks (and possibly more TBC):

• Jayanth on DorkSynth – "an extension to collaborative Performance art using the Kinect. Collaboratively arrange and perform in a Physics based environment to interactively generate music while shakin’ it!"

• Premasagar talking about his latest Javascript project that mashes task tracking and visualisations up.

• Chris on TapToChat – "Tap to experiment: two indie developers attempt to crack the app-store."

• Erik – "Brighton Marathon iPhone app: How we used location and real time results to help people follow the Brighton Marathon."

Brighton iPhone Creators Meeting Update

Good meeting and encouraging to hear that you can still succeed in developing applications if you have the right design for the right market. A few interesting points:-

· The competition was already well established.

· While keeping in mind who your audience is, design should be simple and intuitive, do one thing really well and be different.

· More revenue is coming from the advert supported free version than the paid one.

· Core development was done over a 2 week period.

· Make it easy for people to register that they like your stuff.

With changes planned soon I’m looking forward to their updated talk.

Brighton iPhone Creators Meeting Tuesday 22nd March 2011

This monthly meet up is a great event. Very friendly people and you always learn something new.

This month, there will be a post-mortem from Chris Ross and Nick Kuh, on their recent success with Tap To Chat. A collaboration between 2 Indie iPhone Developers sharing the costs and now rewards of a personal project that has so far generated over 150,000 downloads in 2 months.

August UK Windows Phone User Group

Having missed the first one in London I’ve now registered for the next one next Wednesday.

http://wpug.net/2010/08/13/second-meeting-register-now/

Having decided to get stuck into iPhone development I now have all the tools – the macbook, the development software and even an iPod Touch to do some real testing on. I have an idea for an app and found a local bunch of iPhone developers.

What I’m lacking is the time to do the development.

Despite this I’m investing a little time in seeing where the Windows Phone has got to.

Will the hardware be good enough to make people buy and use the phone?

Will it just attract hardcore xbox and Zune users?

Will I be tempted back?

I hope to get a few answers on Wednesday and report back.

Developing for the iPhone – 4 months on

I can’t believe it’s been 4 months since taking the iPhone Developers course! To strengthen the teaching, I’ve been working through the videos of the Stanford University iPhone course (posted onto iTunesU), the book Beginning iPhone Development and more recently some of the sample applications from Apple.

There has been a plus side to the slowness in that I decided not to run out and buy an iPhone in February but wait until I had an app ready to test! I’ll probabaly need to get the latest iPhone to test on so that has saved me from buying two iPhone in one year.

It’s Windows Mobile Jim, but not as we know it.

Windows Mobile 7 developer tools were made available at MIX10 this week.

The good news is that they make great use of Silverlight and XNA.

The bad news is that there is no .NET compact framework.

Thus any Visual Basic/C# skills are now redundant for Windows Mobile development.

As a mobility developer I have to decide how I spend my development time. In terms of a target audience it has to be the iPhone and iPad. While I may be competing in a jungle of iPhone apps I fancy my chances more than spending time developing Windows Phone applications for a very small user base.

So watch this space as iPhone Apps start appearing.

And who knows, you may even see the odd Windows Phone app as well.

Registration finally open

Yes I’m now booked into the London Tech Days: Windows Phone 7 Series day on Friday 16th April as registrations opened today.

It will be interesting to see how things have changed from Windows Mobile 6 and I’ll update my findings here.

Clash of technical days

Difficult choice on Friday 16th April. Microsoft have a great looking day on the new Windows Mobile 7 Series Phone while in another part of London there is the SQL Bits user conference.

SQL is used in my day to day work but I am looking at Windows Phone development and as there is very little content around it would be a good day to go to.

I’ll wait and see what the content of each day is going to be before making a decision.

Welcome

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We’ll be discussing changes in technology and how companies can take advantage of the changes to improve their business position.