Hey, it’s December! The December PittMFUG meeting will be on Thursday December 17th, 6:30pm at New Perspective. We’ll be talking animation and Open Source Flash Development, so there’s a little something for everyone.

Here’s all the details:

Character Animation in Flash – Nathan Mazur
Local cartoonist / animator Nathan Mazur will demonstrate how he sets up a character for animation in Flash, some standard practices for exporting the animation to video, as well as the plugins he uses to streamline his workflow. He will also share some examples of his work that have helped him develop his current techniques through trial and error. This is a design topic for all levels.

Open Source Flash Development: Breaking the Barriers of the Flash IDE – Mick Rose
Open source Flash has been a revolution for Flash and has made a major impact on how people build Flash content. The open source tools available expand on Flash’s existing tool set, enabling you to perform such tasks as easily create full RIA experiences, AS2 to AS3 integration, & debugging tools. However, many of these useful tools are powerful yet lack documentation.

This presentation explains in step-by-step detail how to use some very useful open source solutions. This is an intermediate to advanced developer topic.

Please RSVP via email or on facebook .

PittMFUG November Meeting
Thursday December 17th
6:30pm
at New Perspective
google maps

FYI: We’ll be holding the meeting upstairs.If you arrive after 6:30pm the front doors will be locked and you’ll have to call or text the number posted on the door to get in.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the meeting last night.  It was great to be back to our normal venue and to see so many new faces!

We have some links to post based on the presentations from last night:

Interactive Installation at the August Wilson Center – Chris Natale & Jon Dascola
Jon and Chris’s slides
Try the online version of the installation
Send a text message beginning with I want or I need to 79649 to see your message appear.

News and New Things – Josh Sager & Val Head
Links:
Browser Lab
AIR 2.0
Flash Player 10.1 beta
Applications for iPhone

Congrats to our software winners, too!

After taking October off for Flashpitt and having a few “off-site” meetings, we are back to our usual format and back in our usual space! To celebrate the return, we’ll have free food and software giveaways on top of our regular presentations.

You read that right, we’ll be doing a software giveaway at this meeting.  All the meeting sign-ins for the last 6 months will be entered into a drawing for $2100 worth of Adobe Software. You must be present to win! If that isn’t enough, we also have a Flexbuilder 3 license to give away as well. So that’s two chances to win free software. Not a bad deal, huh?

We also have a great meeting planned:

Interactive Installation at the August Wilson Center – Chris Natale & Jon Dascola
Chris and Jon created an interactive installation for the newly opened August Wilson Center created in Flash/ActionScript 3.0. The installation allows visitors to text message their wants and needs onto a video projection, and vote for existing wants and needs as well. A webcam-based motion detection system and a basic physics engine allows visitors to bounce the orbs around the projection.

For more info, and to try out the installation from your computer, check out this post.

News and New Things – Josh Sager & Val Head
There’s been quite a few new product and service announcements from Adobe after MAX. Josh and Val will be going over some details on a couple of the more notable announcements. Josh will show what you can do with Adobe Browser Labs. It’s an online tool for checking web sites in a variety of browsers all in one place. Val will be going over some details on the Applications for the iPhone feature coming up in Flash CS5.

Please RSVP via email or  facebook so we know how much food to order.

PittMFUG November Meeting
Thursday November 19th
6:30pm
at New Perspective
google maps

FYI: We’ll be holding the meeting upstairs.If you arrive after 6:30pm the front doors will be locked and you’ll have to call or text the number posted on the door to get in.

Just a quick reminder post that there will be no October PittMFUG meeting due to Flashpitt. Flashpitt is taking place on the same day our meeting would have been, and it’s a whole lot more content and fun than we could ever fit into a PittMFUG meeting.

The PittMFUG September meeting will be a joint meet-up of Refresh Pittsburgh and the PittMFUG on Thursday, September 17th at Alphalab. Address and directions are below. We’ll be starting the meeting at 7:00pm

The meeting topic will be a panel discussion entitled “Flash, What is it Good For? – Where Does Flash fit on the Web?”.

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about the role of Flash online. With some well known Flash shops — like Big Spaceship — opting for a site that’s more blog than Flash and HTML 5 on the horizon there seem to be more and more speculation as to what will be the next Flash killer. Have the times changed? Has the Flash microsite been killed by blogs and social media? What role does Flash play on the web now – especially when dealing with web standards. Where might it fit in the future? These are the kinds of questions we’ll be discussing on the panel.

So far, our panelists include:

• Josh Sager, Pittsburgh Technical Institute, joshsagermedia.com
• Jeremy Shank, Artist/Illustrator and Multimedia Designer at Atlas Design Group. jeremyshank.com
• Wayne Lincoln, Interactive Art Director, New Perspective, Adjunct Professor, CMU
• Nathan Peretic, Developer, Full Stop Interactive
• Geoff Barnes, Information Architect at Elliance, Inc.

We may have an additional panelist or two added before the meeting. We’re doing our best to put together a panel with many different opinions in order to have a good discussion.

Val Head, Senior Designer/Developer, New Perspective, Manager, PittMFUG will be moderating the panel.

We’re really excited to be putting on our first panel discussion. We’ll be accepting questions in advance for this one. If you would like to submit any questions in advance of the meeting, send them to us at pittmfug@gmail.com. It would be a huge help to have a nice pool of questions to pull from.

Feel free to forward this invite to a friend.

PittMFUG September Meeting
Panel Discussion: Flash – What is it good for?
Thursday September 17th
7:00pm
AlphaLab
2325 East Carson St. in the Southside.
(About a block away from the Doublewide Grill.)
Check out some detailed directions.

Please RSVP by sending an email to pittmfug@gmail.com so we can plan accordingly.

As you might have heard at our recent meetings, Flashpitt 09 is coming up in just a few weeks.  We’re really excited to be involved in bringing a conference like this to our city again this year.  Some of the folks doing sessions include Jer Thorp, Odopod, Seb Lee-Delisle, Dan Mall, Stacey Mulcahy and more.  It’s a great chance to take a break from the daily grind to learn and be inspired. It’s not often we have this kind of representation of the international Flash community in town!

If you want to catch all these great speakers and meet the folks behind the Flash blogs you read,  attend the conference portion of Flashpitt.  But get your tickets now.  Early Bird Conference Tickets are only around until September 13th. Don’t forget to check the most recent PittMFUG newsletter for a discount code, too.

We know a lot of you have been looking for some Action Script training around Pittsburgh, so we should point out that Flashpitt is also offering a full day’s worth of Action Script training  the day before the conference.   Whether you’re totally new to Action Script or are looking to make the transition to AS 3.0, the The Beginner and Intermediate Action Script 3.0 workshops will get you there.   Taking both workshops will run you less than $200, so it’s a very affordable chance to upgrade your skills.

Flashpitt 2009
Workshops – Thursday October 15th
Conference – Friday October 16th
Flashpitt.com

It’s true.  We have a new site.  Of course, if you’re reading this, you already know that.  With the management changes we thought it was a good time to finally migrate to wordpress and make some changes to the site.  Things are still in progress,  but we’ll have everything up and running soon.

We’ve been slacking on updates during this transition and we apologize for that.  Now that we’re back to having just one site — and one that’s MUCH easier to update — we’ll be back on track with regular updates. In fact, details for our September meeting will be posted in just a day or so.

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight!

Josh’s Unit Testing presentation:
source files (zip)

Val’s Better Typography presentation:
slides
links:
Text Layout Framework demo page
Text Layout Framework download
NYT Reader 2.0 download

Other links discussed:
Color Scheme Designer
We Choose the Moon
INSPIRE

The July PittMFUG meeting is this Thursday July 16th and we have two presentations planned for this month’s meeting. We’ll also have free food!

UnitTesting Your Applications, Josh Sager
Working on larger projects seems to be the norm these days. It’s becoming harder and harder to manage all of the features within your application or interactive project. If only there was a better way to manage this and avoid the following scenario.

Have you ever “fixed” one thing that broke two or three other things? Have you ever wished there was a way for you to know if things were broken without manually clicking every button and checking every feature? The solution is Unit Testing. Unit Testing is an approach to development that uses test cases to validate the expected results of your functionality. Each build a diagnostic is run and will display a dashboard of results notifying the developer of anything failing or passing the tests. As the project grows in scale it’s an extremely valuable tool that saves time and allows abstract management instead of feeling lost in the trenches when something goes wrong.This is an intermediate to advanced developer topic.

Better Flash Typography: The Text Layout Component, Val Head
To date, typography in Flash has always been a little hit or miss.The new text engine in Flash Player 10 aims to fix a lot of those issues. The Text Layout Framework is a library built to help you take advantage of these new Flash Player features. To quote Adobe Labs: “Text Layout Framework delivers multi-lingual, print-quality typography for the web…”

Val will show you how to use the Text Layout Component currently available on the Adobe Labs site in Flash. While the TLF can most certainly be done with ActionScript, there’s no coding involved in this demo.
This is a beginner to intermediate topic for both designers and developers.

Please RSVP to pittmfug@gmail.com or @pittmfug to let us know you’re coming so we can order enough food.

PittMFUG July Meeting
Thursday July 16th
6:30pm
New Perspective2949 Smallman St
Pittsburgh PA 15201
Google Maps

PittMFUG August Meeting

We’re planning a little fun for our August meeting and will be holding it at Games N’ At on the south side. All the details will be going out in next month’s email, so be prepared to get your game on!

We’re always trying to come up with new ways to support the Flash community in and around Pittsburgh. We’d like to know what you think about the idea of holding Flash training workshops through the PittMFUG. These would be open to anyone, of course, not just PittMFUG members.

Interested? Have some topic ideas? Think we’re crazy? Take a minute to complete our Pittsburgh Flash Training Survey to let us know.