I gave a talk on mobile application strategy for Drupal sites at Dallas Drupal Days 2012.
Usually I give technical talks, so it was definitely interesting to give a talk on business topics.
Category: Talks
Here’s a talk I gave at the Dallas Drupal Users Group on creating mobile apps that use Drupal as a back end. Thanks to Level Ten Interactive for hosting the users group and inviting me up to speak!
Some links to interesting resources I used:
Codiqa – Rapidly Prototype your jQuery Mobile app
PhoneGap – Support HTML5 mobile web sites within native apps
AFNetworking – Easiest/best HTTP/REST/JSON networking library for iOS
Check out the video and slides for Fabian Franz and I’s presentation on autogenerating a mobile application from a Drupal site using PhoneGap. We gave the talk on Wednesday at DrupalCon, and the video is already posted!
I’m excited to be speaking at DrupalCon Denver 2012 on Drupal and PhoneGap with Fabian Franz! Here’s a link to the session:Auto Generate your Mobile Drupal App Using PhoneGap
There’s a lot of momentum around PhoneGap and bringing Drupal into native apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Once you’ve built your Drupal site to be mobile-ready, either with a mobile-specific theme or with responsive design, you can use PhoneGap to add camera functionality, native maps, in-app purchases, push notifications, and you can put your app up on the Apple App Store or the Android Market.
I spoke at Drupal Camp Austin about developing mobile apps on top of Drupal. Most of the talk was about PhoneGap, but I also covered configuring the Services module to set up Drupal to serve content to mobile apps.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on Drupal as a back-end for mobile apps, and using PhoneGap with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to build mobile apps for Drupal.
The talk was recorded on video, and after it gets posted, I’ll put it up on this blog as well!
On November 19, I’ll be presenting a session at Drupal Camp Austin called Building Mobile Apps with Drupal on how to create mobile apps with Drupal as a back end.
I gave a talk on this topic at Dallas Drupal Days in July, and focused on native app development for Android and iOS , with just a little about PhoneGap for building a hybrid web/native app. Turns out everyone seems to be interested in PhoneGap/HTML5/CSS/JS apps for Drupal, and not so much building native apps. So for this presentation, I’m going to be talking much more about PhoneGap and how to use Drupal with it.
The number one use case everyone seems to have is that they have a Drupal site, and they want their users to be able to take a picture on their phone and upload it. This actually turns out to be pretty straight forward with PhoneGap, a little less so on the Drupal side.
I’m working on the presentation now – it’s not going to be the same as the Dallas one for those of you who have seen it on SlideShare (or in person 🙂 )
I’m speaking at the Lone Star Ruby Conference today on the Twitter Streaming API.
Check out the source code on GitHub – https://github.com/jefflinwood/Tweeter-Keeper
Here’s the slides from the presentation:
Slides from my presentation at Dallas Drupal Camp 2011
Building Mobile Applications with Drupal
View more presentations from Jeff Linwood
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Using Prezi to give a tech talk
On Thursday, I gave my first talk about Drupal! Fito Kahn organizes the Austin Drupal Newbies Meetup, and we had lunch with him at the Southwest Drupal Summit in Houston last month. I was feeling pretty inspired from watching the speakers at the Summit, so I thought I might try to give a talk myself on Displaying Recent Tweets with Drupal using the twitter_pull module.
I didn’t want to have a set of boring slides with bullet points out of PowerPoint, so I thought I’d look at a few other options – most of the speakers at the Drupal Summit had great presentations and were well prepared! Browsing through the top presentations at SlideShare is a great way to see what’s effective without having to give up your Saturday to a conference.
I was pretty excited about 280 Slides, from what I read online. Unfortunately, when I loaded it, it looked exactly like PowerPoint! Scratch that. My next thought was to use Apple’s Keynote, but then after some searching on Hacker News, I saw a few references to Prezi.
Prezi is a completely different type of tool – not slide based, instead it relies on spatial organization and relative size for your presentation. This makes organizing your presentation much easier than trying to lay it out on slides. I’m always interested in information design, and Prezi totally changes the way your presentation is organized. You can drill down into different segments of your presentation and then pop back up – everything is in context.
It’s kind of hard to explain why Prezi is so great – I made my tech talk “I’ve got Twitter in my Drupal” presentation in Prezi. I certainly don’t have everything down with Prezi just yet – there’s a lot of tweaking you can do to make your presentations pop, but I’m very satisfied with what I could accomplish in a few hours.