iTunes users can now subscribe to the podcast in the iTunes music store. Click here for a direct link to the podcast subscription page.

Not sure if many of you have blogs or sites but if you do… AND you are willing to promote the UG/Site you can use this badge:

If you want to be sure it stays up to date you can use the following code:
The Image URL: http://www.pittmfug.org/images/pittmfugBug.gif
The Link To: http://www.pittmfug.org/

Feel free to make your own and share if you like – you can see how it looks on my blog in the right hand column toward the bottom.

Podcast
Well we wrapped up the second podcast for PittMFUG. Thanks to New Perspective and Mike Rajakovic for helping in the production. Wayne will really have his hands busy animating to 22 minutes of audio! In the meantime you can access the podcast at the feed url (http://www.pittmfug.com/podcast/podcast.xml) or download the MP3 directly by clicking here (http://www.pittmfug.com/podcast/pittmfug2.mp3). Hope you enjoy! Thanks again to everyone who attended the meeting. Here is a brief overview of what this podcast covered:

Wayne and I argue about freakin Power Point slides vs. Flash Slides. Breeze Meetings. Blog updates and authorship. Talk about demos and tutorials from the meeting to include: Flash and CSS, Flash and Pocket PC and Flash 8 Video (FLVs). Flash 9 (Blaze). Josh Sager calls in. Macrodobia (Macromedia and Adobe changes). And more!

Also, Josh mentions Brad Filip in the podcast – here is a link to his site (http://www.bradfilip.com/).

More
We also talked about adding blogs and aggregators and user group member’s blogs, etc to this site. So as you can see we did so on the home page. If you are in the UG and have a blog and want it added please email me and let me know (sgtpritchard at gmail dot com). Again – anyone interested in writing for this blog should contact me as well – I will try to add you as an author.

-Ben Pritchard

Well – it was a smaller group this time. I think we had about 12 of you show up. Hopefully it was because of the bad weather. I had some cancel earlier in the day because of the storm. For those of you who braved it I thank you. For those who did not make it – here is what we talked about. Keep in mind we will detail in the podcast the events of the night as well as possibly covering topics not mentioned here or at the meeting.

Meeting Topics
We had a great demonstration from Josh Sager of *.* on CSS and Flash integration. Wayne gave a great demo of Flash on the Pocket PC and even called me from Flash. Lastly I covered Flash 8 video and the new On2 codec used in FLVs. We will chat a bit more about the details of these demos on the podcast which should get recorded today. You can get all of the demo source files here in a handy zip.

The PPT slides for the meeting can be downloaded here.

Holiday Card Contest Winner
Jonathan Minori of Minoflow.com won the holiday card contest with his entry. He was awarded Macromedia Flash 8 : Training from the Source.

January’s Meeting
January 19th 2006 (3rd Thursday of the Month)
6:00 PM @ New Perspective

Hopefully everyone will be able to attend. Thanks everyone! Keep checking back for updates in the near future!

-Ben Pritchard

Contest
Ok – so today is the deadline for the Holiday Card Contest… Glad I have so many entries in hand (zero). Maybe you all need enticed…

Icons
Found out that IconBuffet is giving free icons out for commercial use. The thing is you need to share with your buddies to collect them all. I have Oslo Finance so far. Visit here and signup and then you get “deliveries” you can send to friends – maybe we can all help each other collect the sets. Just thought I’d share that…

Meeting
Thursday (15th) is the day for the next meeting – 6:00pm at New Perspective. Click here for directions. A few things we will be covering are CSS and Flash, Flash for Pocket PC and Flash 8 FLV/Video. BYOB and food. If you want to bring a link of cool work to share please be prepared to talk about WHY the link is cool and a little about the technologies and methods used for it’s creation. Thanks!

Hope to see you all then.
-Ben Pritchard

Wayne has done a killer animation to go along with the last podcast. If you are an iTunes user you can view the video right in iTunes.

Just subscribe to the video version of the podcast by using this feed url (http://www.pittmfug.com/podcast/videopodcast.xml). You can subscribe by opening the podcast playlist in iTunes and drag the url from the address bar in your web browser to the playlist window.

If you don’t use iTunes you can download the video in MP4 by clicking here (You might want to right-click and choose Save As…). Last but not least you can download the original non-compressed flash version (swf) here (Again you may want to right-click and choose Save As…).

Wayne animated this all by hand – I think it turned out well. Let us know what you think! Thanks.
-Ben Pritchard