Tuesday evening saw our inaugural London Sencha Touch User group kick off in the salubrious surroundings of the Forward Technology amphitheatre with a few slices of pizza and a beer or two.
After a brief intro the evening kicked off with Patrick Hamann giving us a fairly pain free (tech ‘lite’) introduction to the Touch framework and giving us his opinions on where he thought it fitted within the plethora of development tools available.
Firstly giving us a bit of a low down into the development stack and providing us with some incites into when using the Touch framework might be a consideration, he went on to provide some useful examples of apps that have successfully utilised the framework and touched upon the useful templating and leveraging of SASS that is inherent in the framework.
Slides for Patrick’s talk can be viewed here:
Following Patrick, Matt Spence from the University of Kent providing us with an interesting view of how their dev team were pushed to consider developing ‘something’ mobile for the university. Whilst he admitted this wasn’t the best approach to starting a project he went on to demonstrate how, with little development time available, his team were able to produce some rather useful student tools such as building locator (using maps), desktop availability (how many desktops are available in the various public spaces) and timetabling accessed via a student login. Matt demonstrated how the readily available university data can be made available as a useful mobile service for their students and how the rapid application development nature of Sencha Touch enabled them to get their mobile ‘something’ out to a testable market within a 4 week period. We look forward to seeing the results of the next 4 week sprint on the project.
Slides for Matt’s talk can be viewed here:
Rob Squires completed the trio of talks with a discussion primarily focussed on building cross-platform mobile apps using Sencha Touch 2.0 but also giving us a more technical ‘under the hood’ view of the framework. Rob showed us a re-usable technique he had developed utilising the MVC nature of the framework to tackle various challenges that building cross-platform apps can throw such as differences in UI/UX that mobile users come to expect with their particular flavour of devise and OS.
Slides for Rob’s talk can be viewed here: