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.