Tucson Developer's Coop

For Liz’s report about our April 2012 meeting, see http://aztcs.org/meeting_notes/2012-04-24/2012-04-24.pdf.

We discussed topics including: Windows 8; Android; privacy or the lack thereof with cellphones; workers’ co-ops in Tucson, nationwide, and internationally.

An informal discussion that covered topics such as SSD reliability and performance, virtual currencies and collaborative workspaces.

Mostly we discussed mobile app technology and Shanna’s interesting app ideas.

Meeting was canceled because so many people are very busy within 3 days of Christmas!

In an email conversation a co-op member said:

It was lots of fun. We had a very interesting visitor from Berkley.

FYI all – we were talking about “big data” a bit informally (and money/economics) so I hope you all saw this: http://xkcd.com/980. Good data visualization is a wonderful thing.

Yes, we’ve been meeting monthly! But we haven’t been posting frequent updates on the website.

At our October 2011 meeting, we talked about several things, such as development practices at Apple and a forthcoming ARM-based single-board Linux computer available for $25-$35.

Liz and Francis took much better notes which are posted at the TCS website:
http://aztcs.org/meeting_notes/2010-10-26/2010-10-26.htm She has screenshots!

Here’s my quick scratches:

Chris wrote SawSearch which is a proxy that keeps an index of all the pages you’ve browsed to and lets you search them locally on your computer by keyword, when you saw the page, filter by domain & date range.

Brendan demo’d http://Spoon.net lets you run any exe on Windows thru the plugin. So you can run any browser without installing it, productivity app, CAD. We determined that its a running as a normal executable, able to access files on your system. But, it is not using the system libs, the exes must be packaged w/own system libs.

Francis shared his experience teaching senior citizens and newbie users and the need for manuals with clear screen shots. Francis has several manuals posted at http://aztcs.org/meeting_notes/meeting_notes.shtml , for example

http://aztcs.org/meeting_notes/winhardsig/GIMP/edit_object.htm

The page has step by step notes on how to modify photos, no tech lingo, just has screenshots and which button to press. This is very helpful to older folks who want to get something done. Essentially this is the equivalent of Francis’ reading several books on Gimp, minus the lingo and concepts, boiled down to concrete instructions.

Another one tells how to build a free motion detector for your house using a webcam and free mashup services.

Golda made a quick stop at http://factual.com and http://evri.com about mashups

Check out Liz’ excellent and detailed Meeting Notes from 2010-09-28 here!