Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ Have Gone Mobile!

Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ have gone mobile! We’ve created a conference schedule on Guidebook, a popular mobile guide for events. Simply install the Guidebook app on your mobile device, then load the Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2013 guide. You’ll be able to see complete session descriptions, view the conference schedule, see speaker photos and biographies, create to-do items, and best of all, create a customized schedule of sessions.

See http://swfox.net/Guidebook.aspx for details on how to set up our guide on your mobile device.

For the geeks among you (and who isn’t that reads this blog), here’s how we set up our Guidebook guide:

• We created a free account on Guidebook.com.
• All Southwest Fox/Xbase++ speaker and session data are in VFP tables (of course) and we have automated procedures for generating the sessions and speaker pages on the web site. Because Guidebook supports both speaker and session import via Excel or CSV files, it was only a little work to create those files from the data and import them.
• Guidebook doesn’t support importing links between sessions and speakers, so we created those links manually: from session to the speaker for that session and from one instance of a repeated session to another. The cool thing about those links is that if you’re looking at a speaker, you have one-tap access to their sessions and if you’re looking at a session, you have one-tap access to the speaker and to the other instance of the session (in case you decide to see it at another time).
• Guidebook also doesn’t support importing speaker photos, so those were uploaded manually.

Thanks to Eric Selje for suggesting we look at Guidebook at last year’s conference. I know I’ll be using the guide personally, along with Dave Aring’s Kokopelli application to help me select which sessions to attend when.

See y’all in a couple of weeks!