James and Oli from MemoryMerge attended the SuperMondays Re-Flash talks, a lightening talk night with 7 minutes per presentation. Tweets from the night have been curated by @coldclimate 

Peter Bull — Zunecardr
 
Peter presented a Windows Phone 7 app, Zunecardr, which he’s ported from his desktop app. It uses Silverlight, pulls in stylings from the Zune Player and brings across the social music functionality missed out by Microsoft.
 
The default UI (Metro) is pretty, but it remains to be seen whether Windows Phone can bite a decent chunk of a saturated market.

 Sam Harrison — Animmersion
 
3D seems to be this year’s “new black”- and it’s appearing everywhere from tellies to the cinema. Historically, there’s been a high technical barrier to getting started (since the early days of POVray and DKBtrace in the early 90s), but it looks like this has changed significantly.
 
Sam showed off some of the interesting projects that Animmersion have developed. It’s easy to write of online 3D as a gimmick, but as Sam pointed out, the 3D map on Teesside University’s website is their highest used feature.
 
They aim to break down time and cost barriers by providing training environments for medical training. They’re interesting in hooking up with AS3 developers in the area.
 
Follow them to find out more.
 
 Audrius Jankauskas – Web CMSs and Related Technologies 
 
Audrius walked us though the ImpressPages CMS, currently being developed on The Difference Engine. ImpressPages aims to lower the barrier to managing your site as far as possible, with a drag and drop interface and a hosted version in development.
 
One of their example slides caused a little stir. Interested parties should check out “The Scent of Lithuania”.
 
You can follow them on Twitter.

Ross Dargan — An Introduction to FlexRAID

Storage at any scale bigger than one disc is hard. With the massive increase in the amount of data people are storing at home, solutions such as disc arrays, SANs, NASs may become a feature of every living room, but they’re not easy (or cheap).

Ross introduced a software solution, FlexRAID - a one man project which allows you to set up RAID-like redundant and resilient storage based on folders rather than discs.  By spreading your data across multiple discs (including network drives) you protect yourself against accidental deletion and other such nightmares.

Due to the parity configuration, it’s suited to growth storage rather than data that changes frequently.

Aidan Garnish — An Introduction to the Concept of Time Banking

Benjamin Franklin said “Time is money”, but to Aidan, time is time- and time banking is the concept of using time as currency. Rather than a straight swap, where you paint my walls for the same amount of time as I program your database, 65hours.com lets you bank time spent, to be redeemed later with other suppliers- so I can program your database, but get Jeff to paint my walls.

65hours.com is an interesting project, and in these times of austerity might be a sound option for small companies and bootstrappers alike.

Note should be made of the amazing design work by @grabbins - one of the most beautiful sites we’ve seen recently.

Bobby Paterson — happie.st

Bobby ran through the social aspects of the Happie.st app, which aims to help you manage your emotional welfare. These days it’s very easy to become focused on work and put quality of life on the back-burner. Can Bobby’s principles of happiness help us all?

Happie.st is a company borne from the Codeworks DEV program and embraces the agile methodology set, something a lot of people in the room would be keen to know more about- their ongoing development helped raise sign-ups from 57% to 90%+ over one day.

Happie.st is shortly to launch their beta version.

Follow their latest happy news on Twitter.

Adrià Mercader — Customised Web Maps

We all default to using Google Maps because it’s easy, and those who have worked with multi-layered geospatial data know that it must be fearsomely complex under the hood.

Adrià pointed us to a good selection of open source projects out there offering the full stack, from geospatial DB, thought tiling, right up the display layer.  Links on his site http://amercader.net

We can’t help wondering what the architecture behind www.police.uk is (and we can’t find out because the site is down).

Derek Frost — Development Using the Spring Framework

Despite having more than 10+ years of Java, I never think to use it for web-based projects. That’s because I’m an eejit. The Spring framework has been around for nearly ten years and powers wedges of large-scale public sector websites (especially in collaboration with Oracle and OC4J)

Derek ran us though some of the benefits of Spring - an alien-looking stack for the Ruby/PHP crowd. He demoed his work on a charity site.

Notices

ToonCon information security group are meeting in Newcastle on 4th February.

Construqtive are looking for a local FLEX developer with UX experience. Please contact Oli for details.

Orange Bus are looking for staff and freelancers immediately.