app /blog

Google Group

There's now a £5app google group. It'll be fairly low volume and will mostly be used for discussion of the meetups and announcements. Feel free to signup.

And now we have a wiki

After about 6 hours of noodling we now have a wiki for the £5app site. It's custom written using Django, which made writing it a doddle.

For now it's fairly basic and is mainly intended as a venue to discuss the FutureOfFivePoundApp. I'll expand it's feature set in the future if needed, but it should serve as a good way to get feedback and suggestions.

So if you want to contribute to the future of the £5app meet get editing!

Last night was recorded

For anyone who couldn't make it to last nights £5app you can check out Ribot's videos on qik:

• http://qik.com/video/51892
• http://qik.com/video/51913
• http://qik.com/video/51937
• http://qik.com/video/51943
• http://qik.com/video/52006

Might also be interesting for those of you who did attend. Always strange seeing yourself recorded.

No Meetup in March

Sorry to announce, that we won't be holding a £5app Meet in March. We've been a bit too busy' and didn't really get a speaker organised in time. We've got a few things lined up for April (the 8th most likely).

However given BarCamp is in March I'm sure that'll be enough DIY geekery for most people anyway.

' Ian in particular has kicked off his subscriber service for ShowMeDo. I've just been moving house...

(Delicious) Monster Marketing

Whilst packing and baking ginger cake for Tuesdays £5app I managed to watch the following video:

• Wil Shipley: Monster Marketing

Quite an interesting one to watch - if you are intending to create Mac software. Wil Shipley talks about lots of the in and outs of building "hype" for your software. He stresses that you do have to meet the hype by making good software that works, but that marketing and generally raising awareness is very key.

Love Film? Tweet Film!

Paul Burgess has just moved his TweetFilm £5app to a proper domain. He announced it on the BNM a while back. Basically it's a way to post mini-reviews of movies via Twitter. Nice little idea with plenty of room for interesting features.

Project Brighton

Ian has got a nice write-up of the £5 App Xmas Special on the new Project Brighton site.

Project brighton is:

A series of projects and initiatives to support digital Brighton and the surrounding areas.

Let's hope it catches on and Brighton can continue to be a great place to be a geek in!

a special christmas special

Well the Christmas special seemed to go down very well, which was a big relief. That marks nine events that Ian and I have run now and it was excellent to finish the year on such a high note. There will probably be a couple of months until the next event to let us recuperate, so it's was really good to have such a good turnout for Tuesday's event.

There's a few photos and a one review (from Mark Kirby) already. Hopefully we'll have a few more of both soon.

So thanks for to everyone for turning up and contributing to the lively conversation and thanks to Annesley, Neil and Martin for being such engaging speakers.

p.s. next time you think about joining a start-up check out the CEO shoes - apparently if they look this you are in trouble:

not quite art

Here at the £5 app we like a bit of art. So it was quite interesting to watch ABC's not quite art. It's obviously not got much to do with software development, but it has plenty to do with people getting out there, creating and doing their own thing. It makes for interesting viewing and highlights how much difference it makes when economic factors don't get in the way.

For the geek factor though, Episode 3 does contain a "digital art bar" ( Horse Bazaar ) that has a wrap around video screen for walls and a rear projection urinal!

All of the episodes are available for download, so make sure you check it out.

Iris has been released

Just thought I'd point out that Martin has now released Iris his "PhotoBooth on steroids" Cocoa app, which lets you:

• Take Snapshots
• Make Movies
• Record TimeLapse Movies
• Detect unwelcome visitors, with Motion Detection, and Email Alerting
• Broadcast your video over the web, with Iris's built in WebCam
• Browse your snapshots and movies in Iris's built-in Gallery. Send them by email, upload them to Flickr, or export them to view on your iPod, Apple TV, or iPhone.

Martin talked about developing Iris (and Mac software in general) and it's good to see he's released his creation into the wild. Well done Martin!

The rise of the micro-app

So, call to action: hatch up some idea. Make sure its a little crazy. If pitching it to a VC would get you laughed out of the room, you're on the right track. If you think the commenters on TechCrunch would skewer you, you're getting even warmer. Think Uncov would just laugh and point? You've probably hit the jackpot. Now: go out, build the sucker and figure out how to have fun with it.

The rise of the micro-app

After the day has ended

The £5app day went without a hitch and now there are plenty of write ups and a few photos of the day to peruse:

• Photos on Flickr
• Ian's summary of the day
• John's "developing your £5app" talk summary
• Pete's summary
• Simon's summary

Flickr api love

Just a note to say that we now have a little Flickr api love going on with the £5app site. Photos tagged £5app can now be displayed on the front page. So if you attend a £5app event make sure you upload your photos to Flickr and tag them "£5app".

Delicious programming tips

A few programming tips from Wil Shipley (the guy behind Delicious Library).

Jeremy's write-up

Jeremy provides a write-up of his talk from last-night, I'm sad to have missed it!
Ian.