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Thanks Logan!

Mike McNally (@m5) started his software career in the late ’70s. He’s done a little of almost everything along the way: COBOL, image processing, real-time control systems, system software, multimedia, distributed system management, and financial web applications. Mike survived a couple of Austin corporate acquisitions before packing up his office knick-knacks and web app experience  for a new startup, Tango Health.

Mike will talk about web application design and coding strategies, and how the domains of  ”active” page design, unobtrusive Javascript coding, and user experience architecture all collide to give us a great big headache. He’ll talk about a small jQuery plugin as an example of harnessing the power of your favorite framework for more than just rounded corners.  Check him out at http://whatsthepointy.blogspot.com.

After some great discussions during our last meetup (and even afterwards at The Gingerman), we decided to have an open forum discussing various topics at this month’s meetup.  Topics will be chosen at random, but please come to the meetup with some ideas or better yet, leave them in the comments or @ reply to @austinjs on twitter.

• When: Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 from 7:30-9:00 PM.
• Where: frog design – 101 West 6th Street – 2nd Floor
• How: Parking is on the street, or you can take any number of buses to get downtown.

Afterwards, the discussion carries on a few blocks away at The Gingerman, where they have over 70 beers on tap.

Any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact Joe (@joemccann) or Kyle (@getify). Also, official group on twitter: @AustinJS

Joe McCann is a Senior Technologist at frog design, the Principal Consultant of subPrint Interactive, and founder and curator of the Austin JavaScript meetup group. With professional work experience ranging from the music and fashion industries to Wall Street and the web, Joe’s current passion lies in creating decadent user experiences whether the targeted medium is the web, mobile applications, desktop software, or even a new medium altogether and the targeted device ranges a from mobile phone to an iPad or even a new, proprietary device altogether.

Joe will be introducing Node.js, an evented I/O framework for the V8 JavaScript engine.  Node.js is intended to be used to write scalable network programs such as web servers.  However, Node can also be used as a web app framework in addition to its use as a web server.  Joe will be showing some very high level uses of Node (Hello World), but also some more practical uses including the use of the Express framework and even an example of using WebSockets with Node.

Andrew Dupont is a web front-end developer and co-maintainer of Prototype, the widely-used JavaScript framework. He is the author of Practical Prototype & script.aculo.us, published by Apress.

The long alpha period of scripty2, the successor to script.aculo.us, is nearing a close. Andrew will give a tour of the new scripty2 effects engine — complete with support for CSS transitions and hardware-accelerated animation — and show you the new UI components which boast full compatibility with jQuery UI themes.

• When: Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 from 7:30-9:00 PM.
• Where: frog design – 101 West 6th Street – 2nd Floor
• How: Parking is on the street, or you can take any number of buses to get downtown.

Afterwards, the discussion carries on a few blocks away at The Gingerman, where they have over 70 beers on tap.

Any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact Joe (@joemccann) or Kyle (@getify). Also, official group on twitter: @AustinJS

Meeting will start promptly at 7:30 PM and will be wrapping up at 9pm. Afterwards, the conversations carry on the Gingerman, only 3 blocks away.

Joe McCann is a Senior Technologist at frog design, the Principal Consultant of subPrint Interactive, and founder and curator of the Austin JavaScript meetup group. With professional work experience ranging from the music and fashion industries to Wall Street and the web, Joe’s current passion lies in creating decadent user experiences whether the targeted medium is the web, mobile applications, desktop software, or even a new medium altogether and the targeted device ranges a from mobile phone to an iPad or even a new, proprietary device altogether.

Joe will be discussing the slick mobile micro-framework, XUI, which you can use to build out mobile websites or even mobile webapps where the targeted device is running a reasonable build of Webkit (namely iPhone, Android, and WebOS).  Popular libraries like jQuery are a bit large in size and contain loads of cross-browser code that is irrelevant in most mobile devices.  XUI is only 3kb and can provide you with a large enough toolkit to get almost any job done.  Joe will introduce the library and how you can start using it right now.

Alex Sexton is Labs Engineer at Austin’s own Bazaarvoice, is a co-host of the infamous yayQuery podcast and a contributor to a number of open source projects, including XUI.

If you had to rank the best and worst moments of your JavaScript life, you’d probably rank reading “The Good Parts” up towards the top, and deep down at the bottom of the list would be the day that you found out that you couldn’t make cross-domain requests in the browser. This talk covers the hacks, tips, and tricks to leave the Same Origin Policy in the dust. So grab a cookie, pad your json, and learn how to communicate properly.

• When: Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 from 7:30-9:00 PM.
• Where: Virtue Group — 1206 W 43rd Street Austin TX 78756
• How: Parking is on the street, or you can take the #3 bus or #338 bus.

Afterwards, the discussion carries on one block away at The Draught House, where it just happens to be pint night so you can get your beer fix here.

Any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact Joe (@joemccann) or Kyle (@getify). Also, official group on twitter: @AustinJS

Aaron Forsander is a web developer from Austin, TX.  He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and, to the chagrin of his parents, immediately discarded it to build web applications.  He is currently a developer for Four Kitchens where he helps them make BIG websites.

Building Desktop Applications Using Adobe AIR and JavaScript

As a JavaScript developer you don’t have to limit yourself to the web.  Adobe AIR allows web developers to create desktop applications with technologies they are familiar with including Flash, Flex and JavaScript. This talk demonstrates the basics on how to create desktop applications entirely in JavaScript.  I addition, I will also talk about helpful libraries and frameworks that allow you to develop rapidly, organize your code and unit test.  You can do more with Adobe AIR than just build Twitter clients, I promise!

• When:  Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 from  7:30-9:30 PM.
• Where:  Virtue Group –  1206 W 43rd Street Austin TX 78756
• How:  Parking is on the street, or you can take the #3 bus or #338 bus.

Afterwards, the discussion carries on one block away at The Draught House, where it just happens to be pint night so you can get your beer fix here.

Any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact Joe (@joemccann) or Kyle (@getify).  Also, official group on twitter: @AustinJS

The event details are as follows:

• Where: Kung Fu Saloon - 510 Rio Grande Street Austin, TX 78701
• When: Monday, March 15, 2010 from 4pm to 9pm.
• Why: Meet fellow techies and hackers from around the world.
• How: Just show up to Kung Fu Saloon!

From Kung Fu Saloon’s website:

Kung Fu Saloon is a West 6th Street area watering hole featuring a relaxed atmosphere in downtown Austin.  To satisfy your thirst we offer a full bar including 24 beers on tap, with a selection ranging from the everyman’s Miller Light to the Belgian man’s Chimay.  Oh yeah, we almost forgot to mention the specialty Sake bomb menu!
Entertainment includes 14 vintage arcade games like Ms. Pacman, NBA Jam, Street Fighter II, Galaga,  Golden Tee, Space Invaders & more.  The fun continues with Shuffleboard, three original Skee Ball machines, and board games available for checkout at your table including Jenga, Boggle, Dominoes, & Giant Checkers.
Reclaimed Chicago brick & 100 year old Texas barn wood keep it comfortable.   Random accents like Space Invaders with glowing candle lit eyes invading down the masonry and pixelated images of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee keep it amusing.  Come check us out!

The Austin JavaScript SXSWi Happy Hour is graciously sponsored by none other than the huge supporter and innovator in the JavaScript world,  Appcelerator.  Appcelerator will be on site showcasing their premier development kit, Titanium, which allows you to write native desktop and mobile (iPhone and Android with Blackberry right around the corner) applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript (and even Python, Ruby, and PHP).  The Appcelerator team will also be giving away loads of free swag including free t-shirts for the first 500 people!

And of course we’ll have some food to wash all that beer down.  Austin’s premier hot dog vendor, Man Bites Dog, will be providing us with a “build-your-own-dog” gourmet hot dog buffet!

Additional sponsors and support provided by subPrint Interactive and Virtue Group.

Any questions or concerns, feel free to contact Joe McCann via Twitter:  @joemccann.

Speaker:  YOU!

Yes, that’s right, you will be participating, okay, only if you want to, but it is highly encouraged.

Talk:  JavaScript Quiz

Recently, Juriy Zaytsev, otherwise known as “kangax” and core developer for Prototype, released a quiz with some rather challenging questions related to some of the unique underpinnings and nuances of the JavaScript language.

We will take the quiz, collectively, and even go through the answers, collectively!  Group participation is key here as the more people contribute, the more people learn.

Speaker:  Kyle Simpson

Kyle Simpson is a UI architect from Austin, TX. He is passionate about user experience, specifically optimizing the UI to be as responsive, efficient, secure, and scalable as possible. He considers JavaScript the ultimate language and is constantly tinkering with how to push it further. If something can’t be done in JavaScript or web technology, he’s bored by it. He has a number of open-source projects, including flXHR, LABjs, mpAjax, and jXHR, and he also is a core contributor to SWFObject. Kyle can be found talking about JavaScript on Twitter @getify and @AustinJS.

Talk:  JavaScript instance operators, HandlebarJS Templating

We’ll continue the discussions from the JavaScript quizzes and zero in on a few powerful but often-confused JavaScript operators: new, delete, and instanceof. To illustrate the use of these operators, we’ll look at a pattern for custom error handling.

Armed with a new found confidence in some of JavaScript’s nitty gritty details, we’ll take a look at a new templating engine (HandlebarJS) which can run either browser-side or server-side. Coverage will include both the templating syntax as well as a code review of the engine’s internals.

Sponsor:  WhoLinksToMe

We will have free pizza from Home Slice (they are now open on Tuesdays) along with some soft drinks and possibly some beer, all courtesy of our sponsor, WhoLinksToMe!

• When:  Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 from  7:30-9:30 PM.
• Where:  Virtue Group –  1206 W 43rd Street Austin TX 78756
• How:  Parking is on the street, or you can take the #3 bus or #338 bus.

Afterwards, the discussion carries on one block away at The Draught House, where it just happens to be pint night so you can get your beer fix here.

Any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact Joe (@joemccann) or Kyle (@getify).  Also, official group on twitter: @AustinJS