Refresh Denver

Hey gang, we’ll be back again to Forest Room Five on Wednesday, August 20 at 6pm for Refresh Denver at Forest Room 5.

Upcoming Listing: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/958055/

We have Daniel Newman from Impulse Digital (http://www.impulsedigital.com/) scheduled to chat with us about iPhoneDevCamp.   You may know Danny from Pocketfuzz, Zuvo, or RadiusMS or one of the several other projects he’s worked on through his idea company, id345.

Have an idea for a second short topic for the evening?  Worked on something cool and learned something interesting from it?  We are still looking for the evening’s second slot!  Leave a comment or email me at chip{at}jetfiredesign.com and let me know!

See you there!

Interested in exploring new languages, systems, software methodologies? The idea is to pick a book and work through it as a group. Meet at the Google Group ‘Denver Programmer Study Group’.

About a month ago, some of us got together to work through the book PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra. We are now moving on to Agile Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and DHH.

The Venue is experimental and fluid. We have been meeting at a Starbucks, but we plan to experiment with on-line resources: http://programmer-study-group.campfirenow.com

Refresh Denver is considering moving it’s meetings to a Wednesday or Thursday night. Which to you prefer?

If you didn’t receive an e-mail vote-invite from vosnap please mark your choice at votemonkey.

Update: As of Wednesday, Nov. 28th @ 20:45 MST, we have 10 votes for Wednesday and 9 for Thursday — looks like it will be a close one. Also, the Vosnap poll will close in a couple hours but the VoteMonkey will remain open for a week.

Update: As of Thursday, Nov. 29th @ 9:15 MST, Vosnap has been closed with votes totaling at Wednesday = 8 and Thursday = 5. As for VoteMonkey votes are currently at Wednesday = 2 and Thursday = 4. Thus far the grand total is at Wednesday = 10 and Thursday = 9. If you haven’t voted yet please do so at VoteMoneky — this will be avaliable for only a few more days.

Update: As of Monday, Dec. 5th @ 13:15 MST, Vosnap has been closed with votes totaling at Wednesday = 8 and Thursday = 5. As for VoteMonkey votes are currently at Wednesday = 8 and Thursday = 5. Thus far the grand total is at Wednesday = 14 and Thursday = 10. If you haven’t voted yet please do so at VoteMoneky — this will be avaliable for only a few more days.

It’s been discussed a few times in the past that the group should work on something as a team.

So far there is a few already working on a collaborative talent / job board project which someday will live at http://work.refreshdenver.org/.

But here are some other ideas:

• A map mash-up with members’ locations (e.g., work and home) relative to each other and even maybe local coffee shops — allowing members to get together on a more frequent and regular basis
• A gallery section to showcase recent projects done by members
• Facebook, MySpace, etc. profiles

What’s your suggestion?

Need some defaults, standards, and maybe a little shimmer applied to you work, then look no further. Below you’ll find some great links to some “kick-ass” resources. Enjoy and code well.

Start with a clean slate and use Eric Meyer’s “baseline” style sheet:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/14/reworked-reset/

Or try Faruk Ates’s “initial” style sheet:
http://kurafire.net/lab/initial.css?v21

Next, slap IE into standard compliancy with this JavaScript library:
http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/

Also, this is great for making IE apply the hover state to anything (if you don’t use the IE JS library above):
http://www.xs4all.nl/~peterned/csshover.html

Need a little extra “zip” then learn and use the jquery library, it’s the one I recommend:
http://jquery.com/

Lastly, when you have the time, check out this style guide:
http://webstyleguide.com/

No matter whom you talk to, it seems that every professional has a different set of tools in their web industry toolbox. Sure there’s the more common tools such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver — but what I would like to know about is the “not so common,” as I’m sure others do to. So what great tools do you use and recommend, and in particular, what FREE and NOT-TO-EXPENSIVE tools do you use?

For example, if I’m on my Windows box, I find myself using Notepad++ a lot. This tool is great for just about any file type including plain text to javascript to html to xml to sql and more because it has a lot of great features. For example, it has syntax highlighting, line numbers, line collapse, the ability to expand through plugins, et cetera.

Anyway, here’s a short list of some others by category…

Design:

• Blender [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• Inkscape [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• NVU, for the none code-monkeys [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• Scribus [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• HTML-Kit [WIN]

Productivity:

• OpenOffice.org [WIN/OSX/*NIX]

Utility:

• Putty [WIN]
• Cyberduck [OSX]
• Core FTP Lite [WIN]

So what’s your recommendation, what are your must haves?