Announcing: PreDevCamp Kansas City

[Derek Gathright]

Greetings!

PreDevCamp Kansas City is quickly approaching and we wanted to at least reach out to those who may be interested in attending.  If you haven't yet registered and are interested, please do so at http://kansascity.predevcamp.org/registration/.  (Follow up emails will only be sent to those that have registered)

Huh? Wait? What is PreDevCamp?  No, it's not the devcamp before the devcamp, it is Pre (with a capital "P"), as in Palm Pre.  This is a devcamp inspired by events like Barcamp and iPhoneDevCamp, a not-for-profit gathering of developers & designers in dozens of cities around the world with the focus being on Palm's newest mobile device, the Palm Pre, and its operating system, WebOS.  If you didn't already know, development for WebOS is super-easy because the apps are powered by JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.  No Java.  No Cocoa.  No Objective-C.  This is just pure, standards based web development using javascript frameworks you are already familiar with (Prototype, jQuery, etc...) and all the new, powerful features of HTML5.

Steven Chau & I have been organizing the Kansas City event in conjunction with Sprint, and are working this week to finalize many of the details on date, time, venue, & agenda for the day.  We're close to securing a venue for the event and will announce details when that happens, but for the time being we at least wanted to give you a date to mark on your calendars.  PreDevCamp:KC will be held on Saturday, Aug 8th.  Other details? Expect a full-day event starting at about 8 or 9am, the event will be free, you will not need to own a Pre, nor will you need to have any experience in WebOS development going into the day.  In fact, we're assuming most won't own a Pre or have any experience with WebOS and that's ok because Palm has made development easy for those folks by providing a Pre emulator with the SDK.  If you want to get started today, go download the SDK (free!) at http://developer.palm.com/

We'll follow up with everyone as more details emerge.  In the meantime, if anyone has questions or feedback, please shoot Steven & I an email.  Also, if you have experience developing for WebOS, Linux, HTML5, other mobile platforms, or, if you have other topics you'd like to discuss (or have discussed), please let us know as we're certainly looking for ideas and volunteers to lead sessions.

Thanks

Derek Gathright

P.S. WebOS development is heavily focused on JavaScript, so if you are interested in learning more about the language & advanced JS topics, be sure to join the KC JavaScript Users Group mailing list @ http://groups.google.com/group/kcjug and come to our next meetup!