Monthly Meeting - Web Design, UI & UX, Development, Mobile and more

Here is the agenda:

Date & Time: Wednesday, November 7th, 2012 at 6:30pm

Location: Code Factory, 246 Queen St.

a) Presentation: PhoneGap Open Source

The PhoneGap open source mobile platform bridges the “gap” between Web and native technologies. It enables the development of mobile applications using the Web skills most organizations already have in-house. Build the application using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Access device features such as the address book, camera, accelerometer, file system and more via common JavaScript apis without having to learn a device specific language such as Objective-C or Java. Compile, test and distribute on up to 6 platforms; Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. PhoneGap is completely open source under MIT license.

PhoneGap is built using a plugin architecture so you can include only the device features you need or add additional features as necessary. Wherever possible, the PhoneGap apis to access native features follow the specifications from the Device Independence working group at the W3C. Thus, PhoneGap is working to make itself obsolete! When the mobile browsers implement these device specifications, the PhoneGap bridge will no longer be necessary but PhoneGap applications will already implement the standard, W3C apis. In addition, PhoneGap works with JavaScript frameworks such as Sencha Touch, JQTouch, XUI and others. to provide a native UI look and feel for several platforms.

This presentation will explain the basics of PhoneGap development and then demonstrate building an running a native application on several platforms.

About the speaker:

Simon MacDonald is an Advisory Software Engineer in IBM’s Emerging Internet Technologies Group. Simon has over fifteen years of development experience and has worked on a variety of projects including object oriented databases, police communication systems, speech recognition and unified messaging. His current focus is contributing to the open source PhoneGap project to enable developers to create cross platform mobile applications using Web technologies. Simon’s been building web applications since the days they were written using shell scripts and he still has nightmares about those dark days.

b) Web developers and designers job board:

We will be launching a job board site. As being an organizer of the large community group, I often get contacted by employers and recruiters looking to link with skilled developers or designers to fill in their specific opening positions. I know the fact that those talented individuals also seek opportunities to contribute their skills and talents, as well. I have created a forum site and LinkedIn group page, so that I can alert job openings. But I found that this had been a passive approach... I have been wanting to create a web industry specific job board in repense to the request for a while, and take more proactive approach to support the community. Unlike the other job board sites, not only employers can post their job openings, but also candidates can post their resume to showcase their skills. I am hoping this can be a great local resource that can connect employers to developers/designers. Currently the job board is at the Beta stage, but I will be launching the site and make an official announcement in time for the meeting on November 7th. If you are employers or recruiters seeking developers and designer, or freelancers looking to be hired, please join us. In a meanwhile, if you have a job to post at the moment, please feel free to contact me directly at osamu@zenideas.ca

c) Peer Review of Design/Interface Submissions: If you want us to review your design and usability, please submit URLs and we will bring to our discussion.

Lastly, I apologize for those who disappointed that our meeting will be held on the same night as the WordPress meetup. For future, I will look around the other related meetup groups and make sure to avoid this type of conflict. Since our next meeting's focus is on Mobile platform, I hope there won't be much conflict with WP in terms of audience.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.