Fun At Yahoo! In Los Angeles

Last Tuesday night was July's Los Angeles Web Application Developer Meetup. This event is starting to get really good. Not only were there lots of people who came out, but our hosts Yahoo! actually bought us beer too. Hint to future hosts of the meetup... be cool like Yahoo! and provide BOTH a projection screen and beer.

There were two especially fun presentations, at least to me. Jim Bumgardner of Yahoo showed off some of his really interesting web gadgetry. Now I didn't know Jim when I walked into the meetup, but I have seen his work. The man has done some innovative stuff over the years, that is for sure. Also, he has to have one of the best gigs I have seen for a while, getting paid to build really fun things.

He showed several different ways to choose one item from a group of items, without resorting to any of the usual tired UI metaphors. My personal favorite was the Wheel of Lunch.

The other extra fun presentation was Richard Herrera showing Pickleview, an iPhone application created to track real-time baseball scores. Now if they were soccer scores, I would have had to run out and get an iPhone... actually, I may just end up doing that anyhow. But I digress.

Developed in PHP (but we won't hold that against them, will you, dear reader?), Pickleview combines an XML feed of Major League Baseball scores, and mashes it up with Twitter. A pretty cool little application, I would have to say.

Now I am getting interested in whipping up something for the iPhone myself... stay tuned.