app /blog
We're planning on live streaming tonight's £5app, with the aid of FlashBrighton - thanks guys! So if you visit http://live.flashbrighton.org/ at around 8pm tonight (30th March 2010) you'll hopefully be able to see the bevy of talks we've got lined up.
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Last Tuesday's Bootcycle Demo Night went down very well. There were seven demos in total:
Check out photos of the event here and on flickr.
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Ian has put the videos from Tuesday's £5app online. I've also uploaded a few of the photos I took, which can be seen under the machine tag for the event. As usual the photos are also tagged "£5app" so you can always see them that way. If anyone else has any photos they've taken at a £5app meet on Flickr I'd encourage them to tag them the same way - it makes it easy to find them. Plus we've got some code in place to put photos tagged "£5app" on the front page of the site (with some editorial oversight of course).
As we mentioned on Tuesday, Ian and I will be taking a break from the £5app for a bit. It's getting into conference season (so people are people) and I'm getting married in October (so I'm busy). We plan to return to regular scheduled meets in November or December. There has to be a xmas special after all!
In the meantime though the guys behind BootCycle will be running a £5app event on the 29th of September, to demo the eight projects involved. I'll make sure to post details of that up here later. It should hopefully be a good (and I imagine hectic) night.
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Ian recorded videos from the £5app on July 14th. You can see them below:
£5 App #18 - Allister Furey on A.I. Controlled Kites from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.
£5 App #18 - David Hawes on Safety Training Network from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.
£5 App #18 - Jamie on HereIt.Is from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.
£5 App #18 - Steve on his solderless robot from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.
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Due to various reasons we were unable to live-stream the £5app last week, but Ian did record everything and has put the videos online now:
Five Pound App #17 - Darren Fell on Crunch from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.
Five Pound App #17 - Andy Gill on ChatBadge from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.
Five Pound App #17 - Richard Dallaway (taykt.com) and Ben Sauer (Anki) from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.
We'll hopefully be providing a live stream of the £5app meet tonight (11th June 8pm at the Skiff) for those of you who can't be there in person.
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The 5K app competition went pretty well last Monday - thanks to everyone for coming along. In total there were twelve apps demoed.
Ian started proceedings with Brighton Job Doom - a twitter bot that posts summaries of listings from job boards. The idea being to track the effect of the recession (and hopeful rebound) on the job market in Brighton.
John then demoed the five 5k example apps (which weren't eligible for entry of course):
Paul was next up with three apps:
You can in fact see Paul demoing his apps on this video on ustream.
There then following a beer and cake break, during which Thomas held a hands-on demonstration of his hand-lathed drawing tops (spinning tops with pens in them to create interesting patterns):
After the break Armandas talked about the Electronic Junk Box Organiser he wrote. Unfortunately though we couldn't run it, as shamefully (for a Pythonista) I didn't have Python 3 installed on the demo laptop (doh!).
Dougie was next up with Where Are You a neat little mobile app that let you easily let your friends know where you are via GPS and SMS. Again though, demoing was foiled, but this time due to the subterranean location of the meet messing with GPS. However Dougie was prepared for such an eventuality with a movie of the app in action.
Finally Seb demoed his 3D Lunar Lander, complete with full history of how he took his original 2D moon lander clone and reduced it to 5K whilst also making it 3D.
Judging was decided via the highly scientific "volume of applause" method (as used in all good competitions) and Seb was declared the winner. Here's the Lunar Lander in action:
Here's some video from the 5K App Competition:
It was originally streamed live on the night and there were a few issues getting things working, so it kicks in towards the end of my (John) demo's and mostly features Paul's demo.
I'll also soon be posting a proper summary of the night with links to all the entries.
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Easter weekend is upon us and hopefully this means most people have a few days off work. So if you find yourself at a loss as to what to do, don't forget about the 5K App Competition. If you need a bit of inspiration check out these 4K games:
Or for those of you looking to do something a bit more serious you might find _why's 4K ruby webapp framework more inspirational.
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(reposted from google group)
I said on Tuesday that the next £5app meet would be in about a month for judging the 5K competition. So now we just need to figure out what the best date would be to avoid clashing with too many other events, so as many people are able to attend/enter as possible. Plus if anyone wants to suggest/volunteer a venue that'd be handy too ;^)
I'd in particular like to avoid clashing with FlashBrighton, so Tuesdays are ruled out. Wednesdays are obviously the Farm, so that leaves Mondays or Thursdays realistically (assuming Fridays are not a good evening for an event) - probably between the 6th-30th of April. Perhaps later in the month to allow for some more time?
I'm also still happy to change the rules to encourage a few more entries. I've already removed on constraint, that meant the app had to consist of a single file. Realistically having to base64 encode an image to embed it in a html file was probably asking a bit much...
Updated rules are here:
http://fivepoundapp.com/wiki/5Kapp/
(feel free to comment on them)
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Just a quick note to say that judging for the 5K app has been postponed. The meet on the 3rd of March will still go ahead and there will be demos and discussion for the 5K app, but judging will take place at a later event. This is to allow more people to enter, as there appear to be a lot of people who are not about this Tueday who would otherwise like to enter.
We intend to run another £5 app meet roughly a month later (in April) for judging the 5K app.
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It's only two weeks till the next £5app, so if anyone has an idea for a 5K App now is the time to get started! So far there has been a fair bit of interest, but we haven't yet had any actual entries. Obviously everyone is just hoping to have as long as they can to perfect their apps, right?
In case we need to postpone the 5K app it'd be good to know if there are a few people who've made some progress, but just haven't finished their apps yet. Or even just people who intend to write something, but haven't yet started.
So if you are planning on entering please either mail the google group, mail us directly (demo AT five pound app DOT com) or else leave a comment with the handy new comment form below.
The new comment system is courtesy of Django's comment app and was pretty easy to set up. You can currently leave comments on blog posts and wiki pages. It's not too fancy, but does add a good feedback mechanism for the site.
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Over the holidays I've been writing some example 5K Apps:
Hopefully these will show the kind of things that are possible with 5Kb of code. You should find some short screencasts demoing each app as well as the source and build files for each one.
I reckon each one only took a few lazy evenings to write, so with some real effort much more could be probably be done. The size limit however does make it quite a manageable task.
The three apps cover Java, Javascript and Python, which helped to work out what was possible/feasible. So now I'm fairly confident that it should be possible write a 5K app in most languages. I've also updated the rules accordingly to allow for "scripting languages" like Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP. If anyone has any issues or questions either mail me (demo AT fivepoundapp DOT com) or else get onto the £5app google group and get some discussion going.
Chatting with Ian, the 5K competition deadline will most likely be in March. We'll finalise the date later, but consider this a cue to start your engines!
I'll also try and hold a mini hack night (probably at the geek cafe) before the deadline to answer questions and help people out with their 5K apps.
Stay tuned for more details on the deadline and the hack night.
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A few write-ups from Wednesday's Xmas special:
Ribot also recorded several videos of the event:
All in all the event went really well. Thanks to everyone for helping out and/or just being there! Looking forward to more events next year - including of course the 5K app.
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5 kilobytes that is. So for a future event we thought we'd run a competition. It's pretty simple - you have a "budget" of 5Kb with which to "spend" creating an app. Basically everything (executable code, resources etc) must be less than or equal to 5120 bytes in size - for more details see the wiki entry on the 5K app.
To be honest you can't do too much with 5Kb, but that's half the fun. Plus as you can't do too much you don't need to spend too long on it. It's the perfect way to simulate creating a product in an afternoon!
We'll run an event for this once we get enough entrants in the new year, so there's plenty of time to discuss how it will work.
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