I spent a pleasant morning in Cardiff last Saturday giving a talk at the Cyfle Multi-Platform Training course for and .

The course has a mix of writing and hands-on skills. I gave a general talk about the app development process and then introduced the toolkit. The designers who had experimented with other iPhone rapid development platforms were enthusiastic about the openness and intuitiveness of the screen designer and the use of Javascript for developing more complex behaviours. Many of the students signed up and started experimenting with the tools straight away.

In the second half of my talk I went through how to design a location aware app. This was of more interest to the writers and some of the students who were looking into solutions for delivering an augmented experience on the sites of 200 castles in Wales. As many of the sites have no wifi or 3G they were pleased to hear that we had a platform that could deliver GPS triggered media without needing internet connectivity. I will be interested in hearing how the projects develop.

Rhys Miles Thomas said “Jo’s talk & demonstration of the platform was excellent – the Calvium Toolkit is a highly impressive, and cost effective way, of delivering a high quality mobile presence. The students were really excited about the prospect of working with the toolkit in the future”