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« Previous EntriesTuesday, October 13th, 2009
IDEA Lab
at the last techmeetup Prof. Michael Fourman, former Head of the School of Informatics came to talk about IDEA lab which is helping university projects that are not necessarily technical to make the most out of technology by funding a tech team to help them.
So if you are interesting in working on a cool project in conjunction with the university (or have a cool project but need some technical help) checkout the video and slides below.
Michael Fourman talks about IDEA Lab Edinburgh from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
August Tech Meetup (Edinburgh)
Augusts Meetup was uninterrupted even though the Edinburgh festival(s) are keeping everyone busy, hedout provide the official festival iPhone application(here) and both festbuzz and edtwinge both recently launched review guides for festival shows.
As we kicked off with a round of introductions as usual, this month there were a lot of companies looking to hire, so any programmers looking for work would do well to come along next month.
Before the talks started Greg Soper started the night with an announcement of the upcoming Scottish Open Source Awards. The awards are looking to promote open source within the small business community and to reward those who have made valuable contributions. The awards night is coming up soon so check out http://www.opensourceawards.com/ for more information.
Ben Werdmuller – User Centered Web
The first talk was by Ben Werdmuller, co-founder of elgg, the talk was part of an ongoing discussion about the current and future state of social web applications, while there wasnt a lot of conclusions to be drawn, there was some very interesting observations about what the web application developers of today should be looking towards.
Ben started by taking back the term “social network”, warning people against putting up sites with social software such as ning and elgg and hoping that communities will somehow form around them. Instead, looking at the 2 main approaches that have been used for current popular social networks:
1. An existing social network that can also be served online (Craigslist – San Francisco, Facebook – Harvard)
2. A tool that is useful for the first user (flickr, delicious, last.fm)
As Joshua Schachte said “If you need to scale in order to create value, its hard to get scale, because theres little incentive for the first people to use the product”.
Since web applications(particularly social based ones) are often monetised through advertising, their inventive is to get as many users as possible and keep them there. This has lead to the proliferation of online identities where poeple often have accounts registered on 10’s or possibly even hundreds of different sites, Ben talked about the problems caused by having seperate identities, the problems that can occur by joining them together and why current initiatives such as OpenID arent a complete enough solution.
Neelima Alluri – Developing for the Microsoft Surface
Neemila came to talk about developing with the Microsoft Surface after her experience in the touchscreen development competition.
“its not about getting the job done but the experience you get while doing the job”
For those that arent familiar with the Surface, it is a touchscreen interface in the form of a table top, it allows multiple users to work on it at the same time due to its size and support for multiple orientations, it has multi touch for more intuitive commands for actions such as resizing and also has a basic object recognition based on a tag system (similar to barcodes) that need to be placed on objects.
The Surface is a step towards “natural user interfaces” which is aim to make user interfaces more intuitive to the user and less like you are performing a series of steps instructing a computer to do what you want.
Neemila gave a pretty extensive overview of the Surface, explaining the overall architecture, along with an introduction to its software development environment, its features and its limitations. For anyone who is interested in developing for the Surface I would certainly check out the video below.
Watch The Videos
Ben Werdmuller talks about building a user-centered web from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Neelima Alluri talks about Microsoft Surface from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
July Tech Meetup Edinburgh – Semantic Publishing and Flexpansion
Another month and another extremely late write up of the meetup 
today Bill Roberts came to introduce us to Semantic Publishing/RDF, and Tim Willis came to talk about his startup Flexpansion.com.
Bill Roberts – Web of Data
Bill Roberts from swirrl.com came to talk about semantic publishing, and in particular RDF (Resource Description Framework).
He kicked off by explaining the concepts behind semantic publishing, which is producing data in way that allows computers, not just people, to extract meaning from it. Currently there are a hundreds of thousands of APIs being published by various sites, from Google Maps to Facebook API to Yahoo pipes. Each API is powerful, but they are different for each site, every time you need to use a different API you need to learn its individual standards.
RDF is an attempt to produce a common standard for those APIs so people can use data from multiple sites in the same way, for example to search and query, or to aggregate data.
Bill went through the basic of how RDF is structured, explained content negotiation and talked about tools to help work with and use RDF data. After his presentation there was a lot of discussion mostly revolving around the old adage “the problem with standard is that there are so many to choose from”.
Tim Willis – Flexpansion
The next talk was by Tim Willis of http://flexpansion.com(Flexible Abbreviation Expansion)
When typing on mobile/smart phones without a full keyboard, typing can often be awkward and slow, Flexpansion aims to speed up text input by allowing users to enter abbreviations and providing a list of completions to pick from. For example typing “abv8” could expand to “abbreviate”
There are a variety of techniques to provide the smartest completions that Tim explained. such as reading the semantics of a sentence and using suggestions that make sense (“of” follow by “the”), training the system to the common abbreviations a person uses and phonetic replacements (8 = ate for example).
After the talk Tim did a demo showing off the flexpansion system which was really nice, it trains to users quickly and the semantic analysis looked extremely useful.
Next Month
The next tech meetup in Edinburgh is scheduled for Wed, 12th Aug, 6.30pm and we have talks lined up from Kate Ho & Neelima Alluri on Programming Microsoft Surface and Ben Werdmuller on User-centered Web. Hope to see you there!
Media
Bill Roberts talks about data on the web from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Tim Willis talks about flexible text expansion from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
June Tech Meetup – Iphone Vs Android
June was the month of mobile development, Kate Ho told us how to develop an iPhone application in 10 steps, and Andrey Levushkin talked about his experience developing an application for hedout (http://hedout.com/) on the Android platform.
Jessica Williamson also announced the launch of Startup Cafe (http://startupcafe.co.uk), where you can “Get your dose of Edinburgh innovation news”
Kate Ho on the IPhone
Kate Ho’s talk was based around developing an iPhone application in 10 steps.
- step 1. get a mac + itouch / iphone (intel based).
- step 2. have an idea and prototype it (draw your main interfaces to scale).
- step 3. fire up xcode.
- step 4. open the interface builder and build your interface.
- step 5. write some code.
- step 6. hook up the code to the relevant parts of the interface.
- step 7. check out your app on the simulator.
- step 8. check for memory leaks using instrument.
- step 9. test on a real device (need to pay to join apple developer connection).
- step 10. submit to the iphone appstore!
A lot of the talk during the Q&A revolved around the fact that Safari on the iPhone is a very capable browser and its possible to develop web applications with a similar look and feel to native applications without having go through all the hassle of the approval process.
Andrey Levushkin on the Android
Andrey from headout came to talk to us about his experience developing for the Android platform. He started explaining the concept behind Android which is to develop an open source platform that mobile phone manufacturers can install on their handsets, This allows developers to write applications for the
platform that will run on any handset which uses android.
(After announcing that Android will be installed on 18 devices by the end of the year, the question “is that worldwide” got a laugh. Android is reasonably new and hasnt yet reached userbases as large as the iPhone).
Andrey went on to explain how android applications are structured, it uses the concept of activities where each activity represent one (or a set of closely related) user actions. Activities are launched through another concept of “intents” (for example, I want to write a text message) this allows
applications to interact with each other, giving users the ability to replace applications as they wish.
The UI system is based on standard MVC patterns, where controllers are written in Java which controls an XML view.
The last piece of the puzzle is the “activity lifecycle” that controls how the application is create / destroyed / hidden etc, the platform notifies applications of when they will be put in the background or removed from memory.
After the talk finished there was a lot of discussion comparing the Android and iPhone platforms, Most of the discussion revolved around the much publicised nuances of the iPhone App Store approval process, in which a lot of developers have complained about inconsistent and unfair rulings. But if you are thinking about developing a mobile application, I would definitely check out both of the videos below.
Media
Andrey Levushkin – Android development from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Kate Ho talks about iPhone development from TechMeetup on Vimeo.