September is going to be crazy.

September is the Brighton Digital Festival, a month of art and technology events organized by the community and coordinated by a steering committee coordinated by Lighthouse Arts and partially supported by the Arts Council. I’m on the festival steering committee, alongside Honor Hager from Lighthouse, Andy Budd from ClearLeft, Laurence Hill from Fabrica, and Jo Roberts from Wired Sussex. Working with the industrious Jonathan Aizlewood, I helped coordinate and design the web site for the festival and I’m deeply involved in a number of the events taking place during the month. In fact, the festival is the reason that my own conference, Update 2011, came into being.

Things kick off on the 1st of September with the Semiconductor Private View for their Solar Systems exhibit, curated by Lighthouse. This will also serve as the launch event of the festival. I will be giving a short speech at the event, alongside Honor, Sally Abbott, Regional Director, Arts Council England South East and Councillor Geoffrey Bowden, Cabinet Member for Culture, Recreation and Tourism, Brighton and Hove City Council.

The next day, I will be attending dConstruct, a web conference organized by ClearLeft. I spoke at dConstruct twice and I’ve attended every one apart from last year’s (when I was called away to Oslo to present the opening keynote at Frontend 2010).

On the 3rd, our speakers will begin to arrive for Update 2011 and during the day on the 4th Team Update will be busy setting up the Brighton Dome and taking pre-registrations for the conference.

On the evening of the 4th, Update 2011 will kick off with the Royal Banquet, the pre-conference dinner for speakers, sponsors, and select guests, at the Royal Pavilion. Starting with a champagne reception, followed by a private tour of the palace, and culminating in dinner in the Royal Banqueting Hall. (Although the conference has sold out, there are still a few special tickets left for the Royal Banquet and for some of the workshops.)

The 5th is Update day. The conference, which takes place at the Brighton Dome, features inspirational keynotes from some of the top names from the worlds of iOS, User Experience, and Web, Geek Ninja Battles, Tech Beats, a Show & Tell stage sponsored by Monotype Imaging for impromptu community sessions, digital art installations, and live music.

Following the conference, we will be moving to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery for the A Night at the Museum after-party – sponsored by Microsoft/Ubelly – where the artists will perform extended sets and where we’ll have even more digital art installations (as well as a chance to let our hair down and talk to each other.)

On the 6th & 7th are the Update workshops, where world-famous instructors including Jeff LaMarche, Remy Sharp, Sarah Parmenter, and Marcus Zarra will be teaching classes on topics ranging from HTML5 for Mobile to Appcelerator Titanium, iOS Design, and OpenGL ES.

From the 10th to the 14th, I’l be attending Flash on the Beach. I still remember spending hours on the phone with John when he was setting it up many moons ago and introducing him to speakers for the inaugural event. I even hosted the unofficial opening party at my apartment for 100+ speakers and attendees on the first year and had a lovely time presenting at the conference for several years. I got to catch up with John after my closing keynote at Future of Web Design in London this year and look forward to seeing what he’s cooked up for the conference this year. Flash on the Beach isn’t just a Flash conference anymore, it’s moving away from Flash just like a lot of Flash developers are. (I starting moving away towards the end of 2007. Interestingly, that coincides with the launch of the iPhone and iOS. And I’m damn glad I got to attend the Stevenote at Macworld where he announced the iPhone. Ironically, I presented a session on Flash after the keynote. Ah, memories.)

On the 15th and 16th, I will be teaching two workshops to year 9 and 10 school kids at Valdean School and Longhill School as part of the education track of the Brighton Digital Festival. The education track is very close to my heart as those of you who follow my Twitter feed or who saw me speak about education at the BeBettr event earlier in the year will know and Jamie Wyld from Lighthouse, supported in-part by Arts Council funding, has done a great job in organizing it.

It’s no secret that I feel that tech education in England is terribly broken and that we should be teaching kids to be digitally fluent, not just literate. In essence, we should be teaching kids how to be producers not just consumers of digital artefacts. To this end, in my workshops, I will be teaching kids how to program using a visual approach that is immediately rewarding and lends itself to being shared. I’ll blog more details later.

Following that, I fly to Stockholm on the 17th to teach my iOS development workshop at Cornerstone.

I return on the 22nd, in time to present a keynote on the 23rd at the Improving Reality conference in Brighton.

On the 24th, I plan on sleeping.

What a month. I’m hugely looking forward to it and I hope you’ll join us for at least some of the events during the Brighton Digital Festival.

Following my PayPal nightmare with the Update conference, I decided to create a site to warn future event and conference organizers that using PayPal could be detrimental to the health of their event: ConferencesBurnedByPayPal.tumblr.com.

I also set up a Twitter account – @paypalnightmare – that will tweet new horror stories as event and conference organizers share them with me and as they appear on the site.

If you have organized (or are organizing) a conference/event and have been burned by PayPal for selling tickets, please submit your experiences to the blog.

I just put a new iteration of the Update conference web site live, inspired by and in collaboration with designer Clare Sutcliffe. About a week or so ago, Clare – quite out of the blue – sent me an iteration on the Update site design that I absolutely adored. In organizing Update I'm wearing lots of hats at once and I couldn't do it all without the frankly humbling support and help I've been receiving from my friends.

For the past few days, I've been incorporating much of Clare's input into the site. Any implementation issues you may encounter, of course, are entirely my doing.

Here are the main points that Clare helped me evolve with the design:

• Panel overlays. Collecting all interface elements in the panels into a horizontal panel at the left. This has helped to create a much stronger grid and makes it easier to skim the site. It also leaves more space for copy and creates contrast for the section titles.
• Cleaned up the header. The old header used an image that I love and use in my presentations – the look of wonder in the little boy's face reflects the sort of magical experiences I know we – as designers and developers – can create. However, as Clare pointed out, it said nothing about the conference. The new image says mobile – which is what the conference is about. Adding the white overlay under the title helps contrast it against the photo. To this I also added a blur to the photo itself under the overlay to increase the legibility of the title and draw attention to it.
• Tidied up the ticket bar. I don't know what I was thinking when I created the ticket bar but, in hindsight, it definitely wasn't aesthetics. Clare's design cleaned that up and added another little mobile touch.
• Workshop panel backgrounds.Clare mentioned that the background on the Workshop panels just wasn't working. So I recreated them. They're much more vibrant and representative now.
• Half-size panels for the Brighton Digital Festival and Twitter visually distinguish them from the horizontally-scrollable full-size panels.
• Whitespace. The panels now have room to breathe and the whole design benefits from that.

When working on the first iteration of the Update web site I was concentrating mostly on getting the interactions working well (and across desktop, iPhone-tier, and iPad-tier devices). The second iteration brings with it a much needed visual overhaul. The third iteration will bring additional content and hopefully a few more usability enhancements. I only wish I had more time to work on the site in addition to actually organizing the conference itself.

I hope I'll get some time to go into detail on the changes between the first two iterations in a future post.

And, here's a huge thank-you to Clare – without her initiative, this update would not have been possible. I'm hugely enjoying collaborating with her on the site.

You might be starting to notice that Update isn't a regular conference. It kicks off with the Royal Banquet at a palace (for which there are still a few tickets you can buy to attend), continues in the premier concert hall in Brighton, and ends with the A Night at the Museum after-party at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. It is a tightly-scripted experience, with 18-minute inspirational talks punctuated by Geek Ninja Battles, tech beats, and live/interactive music and visualization acts. And, unlike other conferences, we're approaching sponsorship differently too.

Specifically, we have a good idea of who we want to see as sponsors and we're publicly inviting them to come join us.

Why?

Because we see sponsors as be an integral and valuable part of the Update experience. Personally, I feel that the right sponsors can add to the conference as much as the keynotes, panels, networking, and every other component.

As such to make it easier to get the sponsors we want, we've decided to keep sponsorships as affordable as possible for a conference with such high production value. And we're issuing personal invitations to companies with the platforms, tools and technologies that we want to see at Update.

We can't possibly include everyone in the initial list and we're definitely open to sponsorship from other companies, but we're currently inviting the following folks: Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone, HP webOS, Nokia, RIM Blackberry, Apple iOS, Adobe Flash/AIR, Appcelerator Titanium, Ansca Corona, Opera and Mozilla (web/HTML5), Telefonica, and Vodafone.

If you're not on the list, please don't dismay – we'd love to hear from you and have you as part of Update. Grab a sponsorship pack and get in touch.

Like those Panini sticker books…

Do you remember those Panini sticker books they had when you were a kid? I used to love those. That's basically what we've created with our call for sponsors. In the coming days, I look forward to watching the site fill up with the actual logos of our sponsors as they sign up. (The only thing is we can't trade sponsors with other conferences like you could with the Panini stickers and your friends – oh well, I guess metaphors only go so far sometimes.) :)

Support your team at the Geek Ninja Battles

I mentioned earlier that we will be holding two Geek Ninja Battles at Update. These are based on the highly successful inaugural Geek Ninja Battle (web vs. native) that we held at Geek Ninja Factory earlier in the year. The first battle is on platforms (Android, Windows Phone, iOS, web, etc.) and the second is on tools and technologies (native, web, other cross-platform).

Everyone is mobile today is debating which platforms to develop for and which tools and technologies to use. Update is the perfect opportunity to learn more about the mobile ecosystem and make it easier to make an educated decision on the platforms you will support and the tools and technologies you will use in your next project. And I personally would like to see as many of the leading players as possible to have a voice at the event and to support their teams at the battles.

Introducing the Show & Tell stage

Update also has a Show & Tell stage – a second track, if you will – of sessions presented by the local community. We'll be releasing more information on how this will work and how you can apply to take part soon. There is also an opportunity here for a sponsor to support the Show & Tell stage and use it during the breaks for their own presentations.

Be part of the magic

Update is shaping up to be a unique experience with some of the top names from the worlds of iOS, web, user experience, and beyond. It is an independent, human conference with a warm heart and exceptional production values. I hope you will support us and help enrich that experience.

Grab a sponsorship pack, get a feel for the wonderful experience we're crafting, and become part of the magic this September.

Come by next Thursday and have a drink or two on me as we chill and talk about how you can help make Update 2011 even more awesome. We need volunteers, people to help get the word out, and… well, I'm sure you have ideas I haven't even thought of yet.

Space is limited so please sign up today.

Where: The beautiful foyer of Lighthouse Arts and Training
When: Thursday, 7th of July, 2011. 6:30PM for a 7PM start

Update 2011 is not your mama's conference: it's not just about mobile technologies and user experience, it is an experience… starting with the pre-conference dinner on the 4th of September.

The venue for our pre-conference dinner? Yes, it's a palace. Yes, there will be a private tour of the whole place (it's the Royal Pavilion). Yes, you can join in and rub shoulders with the speakers, enjoy the drinks reception, and dine like royalty in the Banqueting Hall. There are only 42 Royal Dinner tickets in total and they're going fast so grab one today for just £249 before they sell out (they include access to the conference.)

Early-bird tickets to Update are also still available for just £99. Early bird tickets end on 15th of July and the regular price is just £125.

Did I mention how hard Update is going to rock? Don't miss the experience!

Beyond the administrative headache, charging VAT creates two price tiers: one for VAT-registered individuals and companies and one for non-VAT-registered ones. Basically, if you're not VAT registered, you end up paying 20% more for things. What this means in practice is that individuals that can afford it the least (mostly freelancers, if you think about the audience for Update) get shafted with an additional 20%. That sucks.

So what can a conference do? Well, we can absorb the VAT. We can include it in the cost and charge everyone the same price. Given that the early bird tickets for Update are £99, if that's VAT-inclusive (i.e., if we absorb the VAT), it means that the price is actually £82.50 + £16.50 VAT. When we absorb the VAT, we pay that £16.50 to the tax man and take home £82.50.

So why not just absorb the VAT for everyone? If we do that, we're giving VAT-registered companies a 20% discount. They still pay £99 but they get £16.50 of that back. So they've actually only paid £82.50. Having larger companies pay £82.50 while freelancers are paying £99 doesn't feel fair to me at all.

Another issue is that it actually involves more work on my part because VAT-registered companies require a VAT receipt. EventBrite (or any other online ticketing system that I've tested) doesn't handle the generation of VAT receipts. This means that a person (read: me) has to take time out to create a VAT receipt manually (I use FreeAgent for this) and send it over. This may seem like a small thing but multiply it by a few hundred tickets for a conference and the time it takes quickly adds up. If you were to calculate a conservative 10 minutes for communicating with the attendee, getting their invoice details, drawing up the invoice, and emailing it, it would take 33 hours for 200 tickets. So not only would VAT registered companies be getting a discount at our expense, they would also be costing us more in terms of administration costs.

So how can you solve this issue to create a system that's fair to everyone, including the conference? That's where Update's "one price for all" policy comes in.

Essentially, as a incentive to freelancers and smaller entities, we absorb the VAT for non-VAT registered entities. This is a special discount for freelancers and tiny companies that are not VAT registered. So, if you're a freelancer you pay £99, not £99 + VAT ( £118.80) for a ticket. You don't get shafted with the VAT. This is good. If you're a VAT registered company, we don't absorb the VAT for you. Instead you pay £99 + VAT (£118.80) and you get the VAT back from the tax man so you also end up paying the exact same £99. (VAT-registered companies can purchase tickets from the EventBrite site as usual and then email me – aral@aralbalkan.com – to ask for a VAT receipt. We'll send you a VAT receipt/invoice including the unpaid VAT portion at this time.)

This is fairest system I could think of. It's fair for freelancers who don't pay extra, it's fair for larger companies because they pay the same as everyone else (but don't get an additional discount) and it's fair for us because we get to offset some of the administration cost of preparing VAT receipts and manually communicating with VAT-registered attendees. Of course, ideally, we wouldn't have this additional complication to deal with but something tells me it's not going to be going away anytime soon.

Oh, and if you haven't booked your Update ticket yet, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and do it today and take advantage of our £99 early-bird tickets!

But the time is perfect for a mobile conference in Brighton, and so I give you the Update conference: the human touch – iOS and beyond.

We have a stellar line-up of speakers from the worlds of iOS, web, and user experience gathering in Brighton at the beautiful Brighton Dome on September 5th, 2011, to present on and debate the hottest topics in mobile today (UX, platforms, and technologies). The talks range from iOS design, User Experience to mobile web, microcopy for mobile, education, and even a hands-on session where you'll be playing with physics engines and particles.

Also, following on the success of the Geek Ninja Battle Night earlier this year, we're going to have geek battles where representatives of different platforms (iOS, web, Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, WebOS, etc.) and different development technologies (native, web, and cross-platform non-web solutions like Titanium, Corona, and Mono) have it out in geek battles.

These sessions will be punctuated by brief "tech beats" where the greats of iOS and web – including Jeff LaMarche, Marcus Zarra, Matt Gemmell, and Remy Sharp – will present their top tech tips.

Finally, the conference will end with an inspirational closing keynote from the multi-talented Mr. Brendan Dawes – who will remind us of things we've never seen. I can't wait!

Following the conference, on the 6th and 7th of September, we are holding in-depth, hands-on workshops on topics including HTML5 for mobile, iOS Design, Core Data, Core Animation, and OpenGL ES (with more to be announced soon, including a workshop on Appcelerator Titanium).

We also have a very special guest: one of the three founders of Apple (yes, there were three) – Ronald Wayne. In fact, we ran a contest last week and 5 lucky winners got free tickets to the conference by guessing our mystery guest.

In case you missed it, don't worry, for today, Friday, 24th June only, you can use the code WINNING to get 10% off the early-bird ticket price on any ticket.

Check out the Update 2011 web site (especially on an iPad or iPhone-tier device as it was designed iPad-first) and book your tickets today to get an additional 10% off the early-bird price!

See you in Brighton in September!

(Update is proud to be part of the Brighton Digital Festival and I'm very happy to be on the steering committee for the festival. September is going to be a great month to be a geek in Brighton!) :)

March is about to become a mad month for me, starting tomorrow (or perhaps it started on Friday, with Geek Ninja Battle Night). Today, I'm off to London, staying overnight at Heathrow (and hopefully attending this evening's NSCoder night in London) before flying to Lithuania tomorrow where, on Thursday, I will be presenting the opening keynote at the LOGIN conference, in front of an expected audience of over 2,000 (no pressure!)

At LOGIN, I'm honored to be appearing alongside some stellar folks including Ben Hammersley, editor-at-large of Wired UK, my good friend and lead developer evangelist at Mozilla, Christian Heilmann, Marc Sands from Tate Modern, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi of Flattr.com (and co-founder of The Pirate Bay), Shehzaad Shams from Amnesty International, and Adam Somlai Fischer, the lead designer of Prezi.com. Needless to say, there are quite a few sessions that I am greatly looking forward to attending.

The Big M

When I return from LOGIN, it's straight to Bath for The Big M conference where I'm looking forward to catching up with, among others, the ever-delightful Dan Appelquist from Vodafone and my good friend and conference buddy Bruce Lawson from Opera. I'll be presenting there on the 21st and doing a half-day workshop on mobile design principles for iOS on the 22nd.

NSConference

After my workshop at The Big M, it's a train to Reading where, on the 23rd, I will be presenting an opening keynote at NSConference. I wish I could attend the whole of NSConference and hang out with some of the other awesome speakers – like my friend and fellow UX-obsessive Mike Lee, the-one-and-only Mr. Matt Legend Gemmell, Drew McCormack, and the scarily clever Marcus Zarra.

Tweakers.net Developer Summit

I get a night's rest in Reading after which I'm off to Amsterdam to present the opening keynote at the tweakers.net Developer Summit on the 24th.

iOS SDK workshop

I fly back to the UK on the 25th and round off the month with my iOS SDK Dojo, a 3-Day workshop in Brighton wherein I teach Objective-C and Cocoa Touch – sprinkled with lots of real-world and user-experience-design-related tips for iPhone and iPad.

Whew!

What a crazy month.

Here's looking forward to seeing some of you on my travels and to making it to April in one piece. :)

Photo credit: NSConference: Stefaan Lesage (from his NSConference 2010 - Day 1 review from CocoaHeads Belgium).

Friday night was Geek Ninja Battle Night, an evening of talks, drinks, and fun organized by Geek Ninja Factory.

I was lucky enough to be joined by my friends Sarah Parmenter, Remy Sharp, and Andy Clarke and over 60 people filled up our lovely Lighthouse Arts venue to capacity to see the talks, have a few drinks, eat some fabulous cupcakes, and take part in a roundtable discussion. The topic: Mobile – Web vs. Native.

Andy "M(alarkey) Bison" Clarke

Andy kicked off the talks with one that wasn't about specific web technologies like HTML5 and CSS3. Instead, he stressed that "to avoid becoming intoxicated by technology, we should take a moment to consider the why before the how."

This was like a breath of fresh air for me as I keep stressing the importance of the "why"s over the "how"s in my talks on user experience. The ways we do things (techniques) are, of course, very important. But the questions that interest me the most are the "why"s. Why did you focus on this aspect of the problem? Why did you implement the solution in this way? The "how"s stem from the "why"s. (The more I think about it, this is just another way to state that we should be doing outside-in design instead of inside-out design.)

The following words from Andy's post on his session sum up his take on mobile web development:

Instead of thinking in terms of ‘mobile design’ or ‘iPhone, iPad or tablet design’, we need only think and talk about design that is flexible, adaptable and ‘responsive’ to whatever demands are made of it. I just call that web design.

You can find the outline of Andy's talk on his blog.

Next up was Remy Sharp.

Remy "Cyclops" Sharp

Remy's talk was on developing mobile applications with web technologies. He talked about some of the common misconceptions about the limitations of mobile web apps (such as the lack of local storage) and used the Gmail mobile app as an example of an exemplary mobile web app. (Interestingly, I did the same in my talk and we hadn't discussed it previously.)

Deconstructing the Gmail app, Remy distilled some general principles from it like "inline as much as you can" and "defer work" and gave some CSS and JavaScript tips, including the advantages of using 3D CSS transforms like translate3d and the iScroll 4 JavaScript library for iOS to create better-performing mobile apps.

Check out Remy's site for his slides from the talk.

Following Remy's session, we had a half-hour social break before Team Native took the stage, starting with Sarah Parmenter.

Sarah "Cammy" Parmenter

Sarah gave us an introduction to designing for iOS and asked Andy up on stage to discuss a current project they were working on where she was designing the native app and Andy was working on the web app (or, as Andy would call it, the "web site") :)

It was hugely informative to have a real-world case study in Sarah's talk and it helped highlight some of the differences in designing for native versus designing for web. One of the main ones, as Sarah pointed out, is that people have different expectations for native apps as they do for web apps. In one example, she stated how a relative of her's was confused when she created a shortcut to a web app on her iPhone's Springboard. Since the app was now accessed like a native app (via an app icon), her relative started imbuing it with native OS expectations that she had previously not had when she was launching it from the browser. You can take this point further, as I did in my talk, to state that web apps should look like web apps, not try to mimic native apps because doing so will create expectations that they cannot meet.

Aral "Ken" Balkan

I had the last talk and in it, I started out by defining the scope of what I would consider a web app for my talk ("that which runs in the browser") vs. a native app (a little harder to define). Native apps are a little harder to define, since, it is an arbitrary designation we make to a certain level of abstraction in the technologies we use to make apps. In the case of the iPhone, apps made with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch using the Xcode toolset are usually thought of as native. And yet, you could also use assembler, or – goodness forbid – binary to create native apps. You can cross-compile to native apps from other languages and frameworks.

As part of my talk, I examined a range of tools and technologies for creating apps, whether web, hybrid, native, or otherwise third-party, including Appcelerator Titanium (which I still have not gotten to build even an empty project for me without crashing on either my MacBook Air or two MacBook Pros) and NimbleKit (not having Titanium Developer, it works like a charm), the excellent Corona, and even Game Salad and Unity3D (at two ends of the spectrum of game development tools).

I talked about how "write once, run anywhere" is a myth. It's not about "running" but "running well". Why? Because you have these pesky little things called competitors. You may well get to 90% quickly on a given platform by using cross-platform technologies but how much time and effort will the all-important last 10% take? That last 10% that determines whether your app merely works, or works delightfully well? Will it even be possible to go that last 10%? (e.g., what if you cannot meet the performance of your competitors who built a native app?)

Without competitors, the last 10% doesn't matter and being "first to market" could make all the difference. But when you do have competitors, and if one of your competitors is "best in market" on a given platform, what happens to your product? Then what if another competitor becomes best in market on a different platform by building a native app? Suddenly, you could see your first-to-market advantage being gnawed away, one platform at a time, by competitors who can fine-tune the experience of their apps to specific hardware and operating system combinations.

Of course, it's not all doom-and-gloom for cross-platform development. Far from it. You can optimize the user experience and performance of web apps and other cross-platform technologies. Gmail is great example, and one that I gave in my talk. I love that they don't even try to look native. By "looking web", they avoid creating OS-specific expectations that they cannot meet. And, being Google, and having the resources of Google, they are able to optimize the user experience of their app for different mobile platforms. Remy was able to find at least four different versions of Gmail, each optimized to a different platform.

So "write once, run anywhere is a myth" but "write once, optimize everywhere" is a possibility if your resources permit it. If they don't, you might find the the initial speed gains of cross-platform development are actually outweighed by the time and effort it takes to optimize per platform – especially if you want to compete on user experience. (Which is what you have to compete on these days in the consumer market.)

I ended my talk by saying that "we're all a bit hybrid". And it's true. Web to Native is a spectrum. It's not black and white but a grayscale gradient. You need to make the right choice of tools, technologies, and processes based on the unique needs of your project, the unique skillset of your team, and the unique objectives of your organization.

Download my slides in PDF format (9.5MB) to see the full list of topics I covered.

Debate

The evening ended with a roundtable discussion with questions and comments from the audience.

Thank-yous

I can't end without thanking my lovely girlfriend, Alice Collingwood, for helping me with the design and production of the event. She was also the one who came up with the idea for the cupcakes, which added so much to the event. Alice is looking for a position doing event design at the moment, so check out her site and give her a bell if you want a talented young designer on your roster.

I also want to thank Emma Wickham, operations coordinator at Lighthouse for going above and beyond the call of duty to help us set up on the evening of the event and the whole Lighthouse team for their continued support and friendship.

Finally, I want to thank Victoria Dawe for her beautiful photos of the event, Angel Food Bakery for our lovely cupcakes and Zoli and Exhibit Printing for being so helpful with the printing of our character portraits of the speakers and our Geek Ninja Factory stand (if you want large format printing or art printing in Brighton give Zoli a call – they're one of the few places in town that have their own machines and know how to use them).

Photos, reviews, blog posts, and related links

Here are links to photos from the event, a couple of reviews of the evening I've found, along with related links. If you've written a review or have photos, etc., from the event, please feel free to leave a link in the comments.

• Geek Ninja Battle Night Flickr gallery
• Web or native? A quandary of our design
• Geek Ninja Battle Night: Web vs. Native by MrQWest
• Geek Ninja Battle Night – a review of sorts
• Geek Ninja Battle Night at Lanyrd.