This months Refresh Phoenix focused on two things; a recap of SXSW, followed by demos of the tools that help us do our jobs.

While I enjoyed this evenings demos, I really enjoyed the Refresh After Party which was a technical roundtable held over drinks and dinner at Rockbottom Brewery.

That said, here is a quick recap of what was discussed:

SXSW

It seems like half of the Refresh crowd made the journey down to Austin for what is often referred to as “spring break for geeks”. It seems that everyone who went seemed to have a great time. Overall the consensus was that half of the sessions were good, half we could do with out, and that the social networking was what really stood out.

Aaron mentioned that there were 22+ sponsored parties scheduled for Saturday night. He also said that he came home with 100+ business cards for people which he had a unique conversation with. To me this is really what a technology conference is all about, meeting new people and expressing your ideas in an open forum.

After hearing the recaps, and seeing the connections that could have been made, I realize how much I missed out on and am definitely planning on attending next year.

Forty Workbench

They guys from Forty showed off their internal business tracking tool which they call the Forty Workbench. This tool, which they hacked together in less then 25 hours, tracks everything from time, billing, projects, clients and tasks.

I was quite impressed with what they’ve come up with so far, and look forward to seeing where they take this tool in the future.

Synergy & Visor

David and Tom, of Tornado Design, showed us a couple cool OS X applications which they use on a daily basis.

Synergy allows me to share my mouse and keyboard across multiple physical machines; whether OS X, Windows or Linux. I see this application being quite useful in a pair-programming environment; especially because you can copy some text from one machine and paste it within another.

Visor is a terminal much like you would see in an old-school Doom or Quake game. Upon pressing a hot-key a window slides down from your menu bar and provides you with a terminal interface. While I’m not sure I want to give up the tabbed-interface of iTerm, I find myself wanting to install this application for the cool factor.

Litepost

Nathan has been working on Litepost for as long as I’ve known him. Never one to miss an opportunity to talk, he gave us a glimpse into the new themeable engine, which I have to say I was quite impressed with.

While the old look was a bit unique, it was a little to far out there for my taste. I think the updated look and feel (which I am now told hasn’t been release to the public yet) is a bit more main stream and should help them to achieve their rather aggressive goals.

Ten Ships

Jason and Cotton, of Ten Ships, made their maiden Refresh debut by showing off a couple of cool products which they are working on. The first of which was Vizzo, which is a control panel for managing multiple Virtual Private Servers. Next was their client dashboard which integrates all aspects of client interaction including email, notes, phone conversations, etc.

Intel + Orange County Choppers = ?

Andy Ferra gave us a quick glance into his latest project which somehow involved Intel and the Orange Count Choppers. I have to say that while I was quite impressed with the photography involved, I was a bit lost as to what the site was about as I was sitting in the back and couldn’t really hear his introduction.

Thanks!

Many thanks to everyone who took time out of their evening to support the local development community. It was great to catch up with old friends, as well as meet new ones.

A special thanks as well goes out to all of those who organized this event. While at times I may complain about this that or the other I understand that it is a very daunting task to organize an event every month and I very much appreciate the work that goes into this.

See you all next month!