Wednesday 8th May: Leeds 1K demos & Sam Foster’s farewell
Continuing on from last month we’ll look at some of the 1k demo’s we’ve coded so please bring along your kilobyte sized javascript demos! Hopefully we’ll have a few to look at and the author can talk us through their code & ideas.
Also this is a particularly special month as it’s the last one that Sam Foster (JS Leeds user-group founder) will be with us before he heads of the pond for life in the States. To mark the occasion we’ll wrap up a little earlier than usual (around 7:30) and head down to the Weatherspoon’s on Millennium Square for optional food & beer.
We’ll be at Old Broadcasting House from 18:30 onward, look forward to seeing you tomorrow!
April Meetup: Js1k and Procedural Generation
This month we’re going to peek under the covers of some of the awesome js1k demos and look at techniques for generating patterns in javascript. There will be demo candy and there will be live coding.
As you may notice, this blog is still on posterous for now - we have until the end of the month to move elsewhere. Likewise with our location; this month we’ll be at Old Broadcasthing House as normal and we’ll announce the plan for May when we have one :)
Meantime, please join us at the Old Broadcasting House, at 6:30pm, Wednesday the 10th April(Notice how its the 2nd Wednesday of every month, block it out in your calenday)
UPDATE:
NodeUpNorth is in the Brewery Tap the same evening this month. Lets head down there afterwards (8-8:30 onwards).
You should follow us on twitter, register at eventbrite, and look out for future posts at http://leedsjs.org/somewhere.
March Meetup: Ember.js and more
This month we’ll pick up where we left of with our learning-by-doing look at Ember.js. We started roughing out task-timer functionality on top of the todo demo; we’ll see if we can get a working app of sorts by the end of the evening.
We’ll also take some time to look around at what’s new in Javascript-land, including a peek at rot.js - a toolkit for making rogue-like games in Javascript.
Note that some time between now and April, this blog will be moving off of posterous due to their shutting down of the service. We’ll still be here however. Follow us on twitter if in doubt, register at eventbrite, and look out for futures posts at http://leedsjs.org/ somewhere.
Also, the co-working space at Old Broadcasting House is set to close by May and its likely this group will relocate along with those folks. Watch this space for news, but in the meantime….
We’ll meet at usual time and place - the Old Broadcasting House, at 6:30pm, Wednesday the 13th March. (Notice how its the 2nd Wednesday of every month, block it out in your calenday)
We’ll head to the pub afterwards if numbers permit; due to demand for food, we’re back at the Cuthbert Brodrick (Wetherspoon pub) at the top of Millenium Square. Should be there from 8:30pm onwards.
February Meetup: Javascript MVC-ish frameworks
We had some interest in and discussion around frameworks last month. This month we’ll zoom in on a few crowd favorites. If you can bring laptops I’d like to divide us up into groups and hand each a new framework and see how we get on.
Expect some angular.js, some ember.js and (insert your framework of choice here). We’ll touch on docs and initial experience as well as how they play out over the long haul.
We’ll meet as usual at the Old Broadcasting House, at 6:30pm, Wednesday the 13th February
We’re now listed on EventBrite, so if you plan on attending, please book a (free) ticket. (Of course no-one will be turned away without, we’re just trying to get the word out)
Thanks as always to NTI Leeds for helping us make this happen each month. And thanks to O’Reilly’s User Group Program for their support.
We’ll head to the pub afterwards; due to demand for food, we’re back at the Cuthbert Brodrick (Wetherspoon pub) at the top of Millenium Square. Should be there from 8:30pm onwards.
January Meetup: New Year chin wag
2012 saw lots of javascript action: we had leaps and strides in the HTML5 game sector, continued crazy growth in modules for node.js (including a robotic javascript theme), increasing maturity in mobile and loads more. Lets get 2013 off to a start with a discussion and planning session. We can lay out topics for the upcoming months, review and plan any group projects and of course talk javascript.
If you have a question or javascript-related problem feel free to bring it along. We’ll meet as usual at the Old Broadcasting House, at:
6:30pm, Wednesday the 9th January
We’re now listed on EventBrite, so if you plan on attending, please book a (free) ticket. (Of course no-one will be turned away without, we’re just trying to get the word out)
Thanks as always to NTI Leeds for helping us make this happen each month. And thanks to O’Reilly’s User Group Program for their support.
We’ll head to the pub afterwards; due to demand for food, we’re back at the Cuthbert Brodrick (Wetherspoon pub) at the top of Millenium Square. Should be there from 8:30pm onwards.
November Meetup: Open Web Apps
We had a little sneak peak at Firefox OS last month. This month we’ll look at Open Web Apps - the (very thin) proposed standard that allows us to create and install apps on phones and other devices using the web technologies we know and love.
In a nutshell, open web apps are html/js/css + manifest. We’ll see if we can make and deploy something to a phone and explore the available APIs, packaging and other specifics along the way.
Join us at the usual time and place:
Old Broadcasting House,
6:30pm, Wednesday the 14th November
We’re listed on EventBrite, so if you plan on attending, please book a (free) ticket. (Of course no-one will be turned away without, we’re just trying to get the word out)
Thanks as always to NTI Leeds for helping us make this happen each month. And thanks to O’Reilly’s User Group Program for their support.
We’ll head to the pub afterwards; due to demand for food, we’re back at the Cuthbert Brodrick (Wetherspoon pub) at the top of Millenium Square. Should be there from 8:30pm onwards.
October Demos Recap
There was some great stuff last night, here’s the links in no particular order:
Dom’s side-project is a browser-based pixel art editor and he showed some experiments he’s being doing with palette creation and textured brushes. This is very cool stuff; surprisingly there’s not many tools out there specifically tailored to this kind of work, and I for one can’t wait to see it made available for use.
Jimmy showed us Rocketbox - a container for canvas games and demos and quick way to get them up and running on a page. With nice zoom and resize handling as well as automatic pausing when there’s more than one trying to run on a page it looks very handy.
Sam (me) put up Firefox OS and the apps that make up the “Gaia” UI for it. The built-in browser, clock, dialer, calendar etc. apps are all Open Web Apps - simply a directory of html, css and javascript accompanied by a manifest. With device capabilities exposed to javascript in the same way as we are used to in browsers today, this is a powerful vision which is coming soon to a phone near you.
We also looked at some goodies from last month’s ongamestart conference, including Kamil Trebunia’s game physics introduction, playcanvas and their FPS demo, and Jonas Wagner’s Simplex Noise implementation.
Finally, we discussed SVG and Uxebu’s BonsaiJs project, a slick SVG-based graphics framework.
Tentatively, we’re hoping to get Adobe up to Leeds next month to show off their new HTML5 targeted tools. More detail on that as we have it.
October Meetup: Demo Soup III
Its been a while, lets do another rapid-fire demo session. If you’ve made something, seen something or tried something recently that you’d like to share, bring it along. We’ll fill the evening with short demos and the javascript behind them. These tend to be enlightening evenings as we get a peek at how people are using javascript, and discover new project, tools and ideas from a broad/eclectic pool of experience.
We’ll meet as usual at the Old Broadcasting House, at:
6:30pm, Wednesday the 10th October
We’re now listed on EventBrite, so if you plan on attending, please book a (free) ticket. (Of course no-one will be turned away without, we’re just trying to get the word out)
Thanks as always to NTI Leeds for helping us make this happen each month. And thanks to O’Reilly’s User Group Program for their support.
We’ll head to the pub afterwards; due to demand for food, we’re back at the Cuthbert Brodrick (Wetherspoon pub) at the top of Millenium Square. Should be there from 8:30pm onwards.
September 12th Meetup: Knockout.js
This month we’ll play with Knockout.js - a slick data-binding library that pairs ViewModels with HTML templates for rapid development of responsive pages.
The central idea behind knockout.js and similar libraries is that once data has been linked up to a tenplate (aka View), updates to that data should reflect automatically into the rendered view, and that view should be able to update the data (e.g via DOM events).
To see how this plays out in practice, we’ll build a not-entirely-trivial application during this session. We’ll get familiar with Knockout’s documentation and there should be plenty of opportunity for discussion. You are welcome to jump in or sit back and watch.
We’ll be the Old Broadcasting House, at: 6:30pm, Wednesday the 12th September and the session will run for about 2 hours. We’ll head to the pub afterwards for a pint or two at Mr Foleys. If you can’t make the talk feel free to drop in for a drink.
We’re listed on EventBrite, so if you plan on attending, please book a (free) ticket. (tickets not required - just gives us an idea of numbers!). Thanks as always to NTI Leeds for helping us make this happen each month.
WebGL follow-up
We had a great evening of WebGL. The demo gods were on our side for once, AV worked and we even managed to record the google hangout - unprecedented :)
So, we have these links to share:
See you next month!
/Sam
