Working on my first iPad app has really forced me to think about design, usability, and user experience issues that creep up that are unlike any platform I have ever worked on. The iPad is not like a desktop app. Having only briefly worked on an iPhone app before, I think that it’s not all too dissimilar but there are even more issues to think about.

No it’s not a laptop! (in your best Arnold impersonation).
Because of the size, people might be inclined to think that this device is like a laptop or a netbook. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you are used to building rich desktop apps (like I am), you will be used to many conventions.

Come on puppy, Rollover
One convention is hover states or rollover states. The iPad being a touch device does not support the concept of hover or rollover states. You either touch a button or you don’t. You can not interact with a user interface (UI) control such as a button, a list, or textbox without activating or taking action on it.

I’m all thumbs.
Another convention of Web 2.0 app is to cram tons of functionality in the form of small buttons or icons. This doesn’t work all that well on a 10″ screen when your index finger is about half an inch in diameter. You just don’t have the accuracy that you get with a mouse pointer. Thus apps need to think about negative space and larger surface area for buttons and icons.

What’s Your Orientation?
For most people interacting with computers/laptops nowadays, it’s taken for granted that you have a widescreen monitor. Many web apps are still designed to fit 1024×768 resolution but more and more sites resize the content and layout dynamically to handle the extra real estate. Not much thought however is given to the orientation of the screen because it never changes. The situation is a bit different on the iPad since the screen size is a fixed 1024×768 which isn’t all that much nowadays. Well designed iPad apps commonly use a split view UI when presenting information in landscape mode and switch to a single detail view in portrait mode because of the smaller horizontal space. Which brings me to my next point.

No it’s not a giant iPhone.
Many people dismiss the iPad as a giant iPhone. While it certainly looks like a iPhone with a pituitary gland problem, it doesn’t have to act like one. The iPhone screen is cramped. 480×320 means you can really only show and thus focus on one task at a time. Most iPhone apps revolve around the concept of viewstacks. If you want to see a list, that’s a view. If you drill down into that list, you get to see the details of that list but you can no longer see the original list. For that you have to hit the back button. The simple reason is because there’s just not enough room. The iPad doesn’t have the same limitation. The extra space lets you display both the list items and the detail view at once.

Input Overload
Your webapp or RIA probably never had to worry about what happens when users click on multiple things simultaneously. A mouse is a single input device. You can only do one thing at a time with it be it opening a dialog, clicking on a listbox or pushing a button. A device like an iPad can handle multiple touch points at once. That also means your app could potentially get into a state you never anticipated. Take for instance this wonderful fish pond app Pocket Pond. Touching the water makes the surface ripple. Touching the water with 2 fingers makes the water ripple from two points. Now try it with 10 fingers, and really shake the water.

These are just some of the considerations when designing for the iPad which I’m sure will apply to other tablet devices.

All the panelists at the iPad panel in SXSW were in agreement that the iPad is a new genre of mass market device. It’s large form factor made it difficult to carry around all the time unlike a mobile device. Because it lacked a full keyboard, it was not a workstation in the sense that a laptop or desktop is. I would call the iPad a casual consumption device. It’s not meant to replace my laptop or the mobile phone. If I am composing a blog post, photoshopping or coding, I probably want to do it on my laptop. If I am standing on the train on my way to work, I would use my phone to consume my news and RSS feeds. The iPad is ideal when I am on the couch and just want to surf the (non Flash) web, watch some Youtube or play some games. It’s also great for bedside reading I would imagine. One of the panelists even went as far as saying that you would probably bring the iPad to the toilet.

I got my hands on the iPad the day it came out and here are some impressions. It’s heavier than I thought. The Kindle is super lightweight and I have it in my backpack at all times. The fact that it’s a bit weighty might dissuade me or someone else to carry it around as much. I didn’t hate it but I wasn’t in love with it either. However, it wasn’t built for people like me. I do a lot of content creation whether it’s coding, designing, writing a blog post, or uploading a video to Youtube. I also don’t really listen to music or play video games. However, the target audience is not people like me who are producers of content but rather consumers. The iPad is perfect for this. With a few simple taps you can do things like listen to music, watch video, read facebook, and play games with relative ease. The file system is completely abstracted from you. The old desktop paradigm of files and folders is gone. That was true with the iPhone as well, but it was mobile device, and people who had no need for a smart phone never saw the benefits.

You might argue that the iPad is a giant iPhone. In fact in some ways it is even less than a giant iPhone. It doesn’t even come standard with apps that the iPhone ships with, like calculator, weather, and stocks. You can’t make calls and, it doesn’t have a built-in camera either. It’s more like a giant iPod touch in that respect. I think this is where the similarity ends.

The one big thing I notice is that all the existing iPhone apps look horrible on it. This represents an opportunity in it of itself for enterprising app developers who missed the boat on iPhone apps. However playing with the iPhone apps on the iPad also exposes another issue. iPhone apps are very single minded. I mean because the real estate is so small, you can really only do or see one thing at once whether it’s a list or a view. It’s very rare that an app presents you with more than just one dimension of data at a time. Because the iPad has a much larger screen, you can now have child parent windows on at the same time. Apps like Outlook which show you both the list view and the detail view now don’t have to show you only one view at a time.

Secondly, I think the use cases are different. With an iPhone, you are mobile, on the go, on the run. You are basically in between states and you only have a few moments to access information. Most people I see on the train with their iPhones are either playing casual games or listening to music. With an iPad, you are probably comfortably situated somewhere, either on the couch or bed. You have some leisure time to consume content for more than a few seconds or minutes. So an app designed for the iPad would be more similar to a desktop app in the sense that the user has some time to devote to the task.

I also thought the form factor lends itself really well for dashboard applications. Dashboard are at a glance apps that usually don’t require a lot of interaction. You want to take a look and see the key performance indicators (KPI) and maybe drill down. I can see this on factory floors as well as command centers. Dashboards are passive displays and currently you can see plasma or 42″ LCD screens being used like this, but I think a personal dashboard using an iPad is something down the road as well. Its form factor is also convenient for being handed down from person to person in a more intimate presentation or discussion. I hate it when I have to bring people over to my laptop or try to hand my laptop to other people.

A few weeks ago, a bunch of us at Roundarch went down to Austin Texas for the yearly new media conference, South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. Although SXSW started out as purely a music festival to fill in the void in business during the spring break, it is now the highest revenue producing special event for Austin. It’s music festival has over 1,400 performers at over 80 venues over four days. The event now has an interactive conference and film festival all bunched up in the span of a bit over a week.

SXSWi seemed really big this year. It seems to be getting bigger and bigger every year and quickly becoming the “it” event for anyone in new media whether it’s digital marketers, social media folks, tech entrepreneurs, web technologists, bloggers, venture capitalists, publishers, agencies, etc. SXSWi is the one place where one can run into successful tech entrepreneurs and CEOs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, famous authors like Guy Kawasaki and Tim Ferriss, and twitter whales like Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Evan Williams of Twitter. It’s a really great conference for those interested in hearing what the thought leaders of the online interactive industry and the herd are doing. I recall last year I didn’t meet that many people from Chicago but this year it seemed like everywhere I turned I met someone from Chicago. Many of them were SXSW first timers. My overall impression was that companies are starting to have a social media budget and sending these people down here.

Panels at the SXSWi conference typically fall under business, web design and development, nonprofit, or emerging technology. I stuck mostly to the web design and development track. Some of the notable panels I went to include scaling web applications, iPad, designing seductive interactions, and game mechanics. One of the things I really enjoy about SXSW is seeing and learning how others are doing things and their willingness to share.

Two big themes of this conference were mobile and social media. Just the sheer number of people whether they be social media enthusiasts or professionals doing some sort of social media work for companies was astounding. The demographic is definitely skewed towards the people with iPhones and it almost always guaranteed to bring the AT&T network down. Last year AT&T had to have a mobile antenna nearby. Location based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla also made a big splash this year. Last year people were using solely twitter to find out where their friends were at SXSW. This year, one of the most useful tools was the trending feature of Foursquare that showed you which venues had the most checkins.

Some people come down to SXSW as much for the conference as for the parties. Companies ranging from big software corporations like Microsoft as well as startups like Gowalla make an effort to throw big parties in order to please the vocal and active online crowd. On any given night, there’s probably around 3 different parties going on and lines are usually ridiculously long. Personally I’m a bit too old for that and it’s not how I roll. I prefer a more intimate and quite setting so that I can really get to know and connect with the people I hang out with. One evening, a small group of us ended up in a Thai restaurant with one of the Backupify guys (another great midwest startup) Ben Thomas. One another night, a small group of Chicago folks met up with some Youtube engineers to have a great private barbecue. In this type of setting I am able to learn more about what they do, converse and connect. In short SXSW is a great way to develop connections you otherwise wouldn’t make. Your mileage may vary depending on your age and tolerance for alcohol. I personally like going to the sessions. I think the early morning sessions separate the men from the boys and you typically see some hardcore technical ones in the morning.

This year’s keynote with Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter was a bit of a let down. The one big Twitter announcement of the new @platform was covered only very briefly. First of all, the person doing the interviewing is probably a better writer than a speaker and should have probably stuck to his day job. Many people in the audience complained and even Guy Kawasaki made a jab. Personally I think Guy should do all the keynote interviews. He is entertaining and gets right to the point.

The SXSW experience is what you make out of it. You can go to tons of sessions and learn a lot. You can make friends and lifelong connections at various parties. You can spend time with vendors and learn what their product roadmaps are. Five days is definitely on the long side and by the third day, I feel pretty exhausted but I recommend it if you are in the industry.

This was a panel of people from different industries: gaming, print, and publishing and their take on the iPad. Unlike Apple’s existing products iPhone and Macbook, which entered existing markets, the iPad is creating a new market for a device that is neither mobile nor desktop. One speaker defined it as the recliner app or toilet seat app. There are currently 75MM+ iPhone OS (iPhone + iPod touch) devices in the market with a hockey stick growth curve.

The panelists include:

• Bill Jensen @billjensen, director New Media at Village Voice. 14MM pageviews/week across 14 newspaper sites. 90% of business is local advertising with a 70% growth over the past 3 years.
• Shervin Pishevar @shervin, CEO of Social Gaming Network, one of the leading social and mobile gaming companies, and over 11 million installs on the iPhone and tens of millions of users on Facebook.
• Jason Grigsby @grigs, co-founder of CloudFour, a web and mobile development firm.
• Katherine Tasheff @tasheffka from Hyperion Books

Shervin actually got to spend some time with the iPad and he was amazed at how fast he got used to the virtual keyboard. Pundits question whether or not people would get used to typing on the screen, but Shervin said he was able to get to 85 words per min in 10 minutes. He also noted that the chip is fast and that there is a significant performance improvement compared to the current iPhones. This will translate well into the gaming space.

• Of the top grossing apps in the iPhone app store – 76% of them are games
• Estimated to be $30 billion industry by 2013
• iPad preorders – estimated 51,000 in first 2 hours
  90,000 in the first 6 hours
• Estimated to be 20MM iPads in the market by 2013

Katherine noted that ebooks already outnumber games in the Appstore. However since most of the top grossing apps are games, one could hypothesize that the phone form factor is not as conducive to reading and that ebook content in general do not perform as well as games. Essentially books haven’t changed since the 1400s. The industry is very slow to change because their model has worked so well for so long. However book sales have declined 5% over the past year. The ebook represents an opportunity for those who can come up with compelling content and experiences that fit the ebook model.

iPad is a great web browser. It’s got a new super fast Javascript engine. It’s resolution is that of a standard browser. It will support the latest CSS and HTML standards. Basically web apps are going to look great on it. This opens up opportunities for developers to make great iPad apps that bypass the Appstore distribution and let them keep their 30%. Also it will lower the barrier to entry as far as having an app for the iPad. Also iPad makes for a great dashboard appliance for scenarios such as the manufacturing floor.

In summary, the three industries see great opportunity since it’s a new product entering a new market reaching potentially a whole set of new users.

One of the more remarkable talks I attended at SXSWi (pronounced South By South West eye – not es-ex-es-double-you), was a talk by Matthew Smith from Squared Eye, a boutique web development firm.

Here are some takeaways:

• Design around the content. Don’t let your design aesthetics dictate your web design. Content is why the audience is there.
• It is not YOUR site – it is the site owner’s site. Your design must serve the goals of the site owner. As designers we are often emotionally attached to our work and often think of our work as an extension of us.
• Great web design helps content get stuff done (with pleasure).
• Spank that niche. I thought that this was hilarious.
• Knowledge
  • Know the Client
  • Know the Audience
  • Know the Medium
  • Know the Content
• Design Techniques
  • Use size to help design hierarchy visually
  • Establish a visual language (green for action, blue for links, features is 15pt font, etc)
  • Use color to draw people’s eyes
  • Design for pleasure – ex. Gowalla’s custom icons, motion, etc

Here are his slides although they are really best viewed along with the talk.

Many people are turned off by iPhone app development because they don’t want to learn another platform (Objective-C). In many ways, learning Objective-C is taking a step backwards. Things like memory management and pointers are not something the modern web developer thinks about anymore. Also the idea of having to have different code bases for different mobile environments can be a huge deal breaker for adopting a platform. Nobody wants to create an application and maintain different versions of the app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Not only is it a developer’s nightmare, but the costs can be huge. New development frameworks attempt to solve this problem by abstracting the specific phone platform so that the developer can write in one codebase (usually one that is familiar to the web developer) and deploy to multiple platforms. Here are some of those frameworks:

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. It is free to use and can deploy to iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry.

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is another free and open source development tool. You can build cross-platform apps that deploy to desktop, iPhone and Android using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I’ve personally tried Appcelerator and have nothing but good things to say about it.

Monotouch

MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices. This is great for your typical Microsoft shop or enterprise that has a strong .NET skillset. A 1 year corporate license will run you about $1000.

These are just a few of the tools you can use to do cross platform mobile development while leveraging existing web development skills. It represents an exciting time because as traditional web developers we can quickly and easily create mobile applications. Speaking from my own experience over the weekend, my friend and I created an iPhone app in less than 12 hours using Appcelerator Titanium for the Day of Mobile Hackathon, and we went on to win Best iPhone app. Not too shabby for 2 people who didn’t know any Object-C walking in.

Last week I had the chance to give a presentation at SPARKt, an innovation and technology conference focused on real estate. I got a chance to listen to Alan Warms, founder of Appolicious, Phil Di Gulio, co-founder of WellcomeMat, Bruce Payne, Director of SEO at Tribune. If I had to sum up the conversation at the conference it would be mobile. With the advent of web enabled location aware phones, mobile applications have the potential to be more relevant to the user’s context than ever before. Almost every speaker talked about or mentioned mobile. The audience was even familiar with apps like Foursquare.

Alan Warms mentioned that on his site Appolicious, a mobile apps directory and review site, there were over a 1000 listings of mobile apps under real estate. Phil talked about his latest project Pegshot which was very exciting. To quote his site:

Pegshot is a photo/video service that enables friends & family to experience what’s happening where you are.

It lets you annotate your life based on location. For example, I can take a video of my lunch and post it to Pegshot. My friends can then see my video, complete with a Google Maps that annotates just where I was having lunch. It’s a service that basically rolls something like Twitter, twitpic, qik and maybe foursquare all in one integrated service.

Another topic that was mentioned by no less than 3 people, including myself was augmented reality. It was a topic that needed no explanation, since most people were familiar with it. I think that speaks to the fact that it’s starting to enter into people’s vernacular and gaining adoption. There are many apps on both the iPhone and Android platform that do AR. Yelp Monocle is a particularly cool one that integrates w/ Yelp reviews. By pointing your iPhone around, the screen will show what you see, overlayed w/ Yelp star ratings of the venues.

Speaking of the audience, even though most people were from the real estate industry, most were also very familiar with social media and services like Twitter. In fact more than half of the audience were on Twitter and a few were live tweeting.

I think the overarching theme that we see happening if we take a step back is that computing will no longer be tied to desk. People are able to access information everywhere now and with more mobile devices equipped with even more sophisticated sensors and technology, mobile computers will be able to serve peoples’ needs better by being aware of the context of the user. Also, people no longer need to interface with machines in the traditional keyboard entry way. New devices like the iPhone and Google Android all support some sort of touch capability. A new class of users are using the internet without ever having to go through a desktop computer.

Taking it a step further, apps like Siri combine context awareness and voice recognition.

In short, the field of mobile is super exciting to be in now. Speaking of mobile, yours truly will be participating in the hackathon at the Day of Mobile Conference in Chicago this weekend.

HTML (“hypertext markup language”) is the core language that powers the World Wide Web. Any server side technology must in the end, display HTML in order for web browsers to be able to render web pages. HTML 5 is the latest revision of the HTML spec that is slowly being adopted by the different major browsers. There are some pretty exciting additions to the HTML spec and I wanted to go over a few and what they potentially mean for the future of the web.

New Tags
Structure Tags
New additions to the HTML markup family include tags like header, nav, article, section, and footer. From the visual perspective these probably won’t have a huge impact as users are unlikely to see the difference between pages built on the old DIV based layout and the new structure tags. However from the search engine perspective, these tags will make it easier for crawlers to distinguish between what’s the meat of the content and what is just fluff. Current DIV based layouts structure the content semantically through unique IDs and classes. We give these DIVs IDs and classnames like header, footer, post, etc in an attempt to classify and organize the markup. However these are abstract concepts from the browser’s perspective. If they wanted, there’s nothing stopping the web developer from naming the header something arcane like foobar or even call the footer something like nav_sub2. As you can imagine then, search engines and web crawlers must develop sophisticated algorithms to detect patterns in order to infer what’s a header or footer. However with these additions, the developer must clearly demarcate what section each HTML piece is, thus taking the guesswork out of the search engine. This has the benefit of potentially improving search engine results.

Canvas Tag
The new Canvas tag is exactly what is says it is – a blank canvas with infinite possibilities. Flash developers used to drawing pixels on the MovieClip object will immediately be able to relate. Essentially one would use the canvas tag to render any number of things from manipulated images, animation, or even 3D imagery. With the canvas tag, you could build applications such as a paint program, or a 3D slideshow without having to rely on Flash. As usage of the Canvas tag increases, you’ll see more animation and renderings that were typically done in Flash re-envisioned completely in HTML5 and Javascript. The drawback however is that whereas Flash is build once run everywhere that supports Flash, an HTML 5 solution would leave you vulnerable to browser compatibility issues.

Here’s a video of a Coverflow implementaion done purely in JS + the new Canvas tag

AV Tags
The Audio and Video tags promise to simplify the mess that is currently the state of the art when embedding video. Whereas before you had either the <embed> or the <object> tag depending on what browser you are using or maybe you just turned to a javascript based wrapper to handle your media needs, you can have a very simple video or audio tag. With the ubiquity of the Flash platform as a video player, I’m not sure this is going to make much difference. Sure this is a lot easier, but we really could have used this 10 years ago.

<video width="640" height="360" src="/demo/google_main.mp4?2"
autobuffer></video>

Web Worker
Think of Web Workers as threads – any jobs that can be computationally expensive and intensive. In the current model, a complex task on a webpage might bring the interactivity of the page to a crawl while it’s busy number crunching. A worker thread could be spawned off to do some intense client side crunching without bogging down the page. This is even more relevant in today’s time when so much is being offloaded to the front end UI with javascript libraries. A good candidate for web workers would be a browser based excel spreadsheet like Google Docs where number crunching on the client site is potentially very slow.

<script>
   var worker = new Worker('worker.js');
   worker.onmessage = function (event) {
     document.getElementById('result').textContent = event.data;
   };
</script>

Application cache
The Application cache allows web applications to function offline when it’s not connected to the Internet. Google Gears is an implementation of this. All the developer has to do is provide a manifest of files that the web application needs in order to function offline. I see this as a really great feature to make web apps more robust. With most webapps, if you lose connection, you most certainly lose whatever you were working on. I can see more and more applications handling loss of network connectivity more gracefully by taking advantage of the application cache.

All you need is this code snippet and a manifest file which lists all the files the application needs.

<html manifest="foobar.manifest">

Geolocation
The Geolocation API provides a scripting interface that lets the developer determine the user’s location (based on GPS or inferred from IP, Wifi, etc). The user must however allow the application to access that information. Although geolocation has been inferred by IP for a while now on the backend, we’re seeing an increase of functionality performed on the front end with AJAX and this is no different.

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position));

Should I be using HTML5 tags?
Here’s a table outlining features I played around with in the latest browsers from Google, Apple and Mozilla.

* only certain formats
** sort of worked

As you can see, coverage on some of the new HTML 5 features is pretty good on Firefox and Safari. However with the audio and video tags, I did find that Firefox supports the open source codex Ogg Vorbis while Safari’s supports all the formats that Quicktime supports, naturally. So if you are looking to use some of the new HTML 5 features now, coverage on all the browsers is sketchy at best except for the Canvas tag. If you are trying to do video or audio, you’d best stick to Flash. I think where HTML5 is useful for the here and now is in the mobile sector. Many new mobile OSes including iPhone OS 3.0 and webOS have started supporting some of the HTML 5 features and since you would be developing platform specific apps, compatiblity issues are non issues.

Build it and they will come? Build it and they will use it? How often do you go to a website and say I can’t figure out this thing or I can’t find what I need? Whether you are building a consumer or enterprise web application, you need it to be user friendly. In reality user friendliness is thought of as “pretty-ing it up”, something done after an application is already coded up. A wireframe or application skeleton gets thrown over to a graphic designer in hopes that they application will just work. However usability goes to the core of the product. It is how your users interact with your product.

The reason I love usability improvement is that often times a small change can have a tremendous impact on the bottom line. Often times, you do not even have to change the core features of your product to make something more usable. Something as trivial as color, size, position or verbage can often change and affect user behavior. As designers and developers of a product, we are often too close and too attached to what we make to see how something may not be obvious to an uninformed user.

“If only the user would do this.” “The user is doing it wrong.” “Why can’t they just see the button.” “It’s right in front of them.” These are the excuses we make to ourselves when first presented with the evidence that our product might not be all that user friendly. We write it off as the user’s fault. However the user is not at fault. Users are users. They will do what they do and you have no control over that. If users never read the directions and always start clicking around, then get rid of the directions and start offering in context help as they click around.

What happens when clients say I can’t afford usability design or research. I say you can’t afford not to have good usability on your website. What’s the point of having a nice looking website or application if people can’t figure it out and leave. The thing is, usability testing can be done on the cheap nowadays. If you have the stomach for it, just go to a coffee shop and ask people to try your software. You’ll be amazed and depressed to see all your design assumptions fall down like a house of straw. Very inexpensive software like Silverback lets you do usability testing on a budget. If you feel like outsourcing, check out UserTesting. You tell them what site to check out, pick out the number of testers, pick the demographics and they send you back a video file of the users screen as they go through your application, complete with a train of thought voice over from the user. Alternatively you can just try something like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Taking a real world analogy, I often frequent this restaurant in downtown Chicago that has a great salad bar. The only problem is that they put the dressing in front of the actual salad. If you are in a line, you come to the salad bar and get your greens. Then you have to awkwardly ask the stranger behind you to move because you have to reach back to the dressing. I pointed this out to the manager that the flow of this was all wrong and it was a major inconvenience to his patrons. He looked at me as if I was some sort of crackhead telling him how to do his job. Now I like the place enough to come back, but this decision to place the salad dressing in front of the salad inconveniences all the patrons that go to the salad bar. People move forward and invariably all have to cut backwards in line. Now I’m sure many websites, including my own have problems very similar to these, but without usability studies or testing, we’d never uncover them. This is why I think Usability is important.

The first Google Technology User Group meeting in Chicago kicked off on Friday July 10 at Google offices on 20 W Kinzie, Chicago. Although it was sponsored by Google, the meeting talks and discussions were not restricted to Google technologies. Everything from Google AppEngine, iPhone development, and Twitter apps were fair game. That said, Google technologies were definitely the main focus. Many talks showcased how easy it was to get a web app up and running using Google technology. A ragtag group of developers, students, entrepreneurs, and business folks totaling around 80 showed up. The event was organized by Uki Lucas from the Revere Group (right across Roundarch offices) and consisted of 9 talks. Here were the topics:

• GData, Guice, Google collections
  Gregory Kick (Google.com)
• Project hosting on Google Code
  Nathan Ingersoll (Google.com)
• GWT and Google AppEngine, Photo Carousel example Widget
  Jordan Beck (Revere Group)
• Facebook for Google Web Toolkit
  David Wolverton (Revere Group)
• Maven2 dependencies with Google Web Toolkit
  Trevor Skaife (Revere Group)
• Google Friend Connect for Google Web Toolkit
  David Wolverton (Revere Group)
• Building mobile applications with Android
  David Lo (Revere Group)
• Building application with iPhone
  Phil Wodarczyk (Revere Group)
• How to Build a Viral Twitter Application
  Pek Pongpaet (Roundarch)

All in all, I thought it went really well. People were really engaged and I’m already looking forward to the next one. No plans have been made as to when it will be but consensus was that it will probably be a quarterly event. It’s great to see a strong developer community interested in cloud services and sharing knowledge in general.