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

Thanks to everyone who came out last Thursday!

Here’s the files to go along with the presentations at the meeting:

Monkeys, Elephants and JSON, oh my!, Joe Kromer

SWFAddress set up for AS3, Val Head

Tearing Inverted Masks, Wayne Lincoln

Thanks to everyone who showed up for our April meeting.

Jazz in the Digital Age
Tom N. had mentioned “Jazz and the Digital Age”. You can read more about it here:

Sunday April 19 2009, 3:00 pm
Carnegie Library Music Hall, Homestead
510 E 10th Ave Homestead
Map

Carnegie Mellon School of Music presents “Jazz and the Digital Age”

Hear one of Carnegie Mellon’s Jazz Ensembles, directed by David Pellow, perform a new arrangement by Dr. John Wilson for jazz band, soloists and digital string orchestra.
The “orchestra” is five Carnegie Mellon music students recorded onto 20 digital tracks that will be
time-stretched to synchronize with the live band. The performance will also feature a high-end 8-channel sound system. This is the result of Professor Roger Dannenberg’s project, which is sponsored by Microsoft through the Computational Thinking Center.

There will be additional “digital jazz” with electronic performances by Tomas Henriques on digital valve instrument controller, and Dannenberg on trumpet with computer processing.
Herniques is a visiting scientist in the School of Computer Science.

David Pellow, music director

This performance is sponsored by WDUQ FM 90.5. Research for this concert’s technology made possible by Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and Microsoft.

Free Admission

Ben’s Presentations
You can download Ben’s Presentation slides (including links) here.
Want to try out Fractal 4D? You can download the AIR installer here.

Val’s Presentations
You can learn more about using the Color Picker Component over at Val’s blog:
http://www.thisisportable.com/blog/2009/03/25/quick-bit-of-code-using-colorpicker-component-as3/

Stay tuned to her blog for updates showing you how to work with Flash as a background element in your HTML as well!

Thanks to all of you guys that attended the meeting! You can access the presentations and source code from the meeting below:

Augmented Reality
By Ben Pritchard
Presentation PPT – Links, AIR App, etc.
Source Code

Working with SWC Files, Flash and Flex
By Josh Sager
Source Code

Working with Color Conversions: HSB > Hex
By Steven Dussalt
Source Code

ShadowBox.js
Need to use a SWF within a Lightbox-effect in your HTML? Check out this option mentioned at the meeting.
Shadowbox Website

Thanks to all who attended last night. We had several events to announce. I’ll repeat them here:

• Art and Code Symposium (March 7-9, 2009)
• FlashPitt Conference 2009 (October 15-16 2009)
• Pittsburgh Web Design Day (Saturday April 4, 2009)

Val Head gave a demo on Flash Catalyst to be released on Adobe Labs “sometime in the future”. I gave a preso on using XML in AS3 where I went through a bit of E4X and how (and why) to write some handy classes for loading media. You can check out all the source here.

As always, if you have any ideas on topics you’d like to see presented at the next MFUG meeting, email us. You’re welcome to present on a topic yourself. Just let Ben or I know.

Happy Flashing! (thx Joe)

The PittMFUG meeting is this Thursday February 19th, 200 at 6:30pm

Here’s what we have planned:

Flash Catalyst Review, Val Head
It isn’t out on Adobe Labs yet, but we have a copy of Flash Catalyst to preview and Val will tell you what she thinks of it and if it will change the way you work.

Adobe says Flash Catalyst is “design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding” and it is meant to help smooth the designer-developer workflow. This is a Beginner topic for both Designers and Developers.

Building a Simple Dynamic Flash Application Using XML & AS3, Wayne Lincoln
Wayne will show tips and tricks for loading XML with AS3 to help keep your applications flexible and dynamic. He’ll discuss writing some custom classes to help tie it all together. This is a Beginner to Intermediate topic for Developers.

Thursday February 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.

Adobe Store Discount for User Groups Only

Adobe is delighted to offer PittMFUG members special pricing on Adobe software. Place your order before May 31, 2009, in order to save 20% on all Adobe products in the North America online Adobe Store.

To get the details of this special discount, members should contact Wayne Lincoln or email [pittmfug at gmail dot com] to receive a copy of the details.

Pittsburgh Web Design Day

We know a lot of you do more than just Flash work, so you might be interested to know that Pittsburgh Web Design Day was announced this week. Much more details to come, but here’s the basics:

Pittsburgh web design day is a one-day, low-cost conference for web professionals in Western Pennsylvania. No high priced registration fees, no expensive travel, just a full day of learning from Pittsburgh web gurus …and lunch! See more info at webdesignday.com

ART AND CODE Symposium

ART AND CODE is a symposium on “programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us”, taking place March 7-9 at Carnegie Mellon University. It features hands-on workshops and a conference showcase for eight different creative toolkits — programming languages made by artists, for artists.

Just as true literacy in English means being able to write as well as read, true literacy in software demands not only knowing how to use commercial software tools, but how to create new software for oneself and for others. Recently, a number of projects dedicated to democratizing the education of computational thinking have coalesced. Emerging primarily from the arts sector, a set of new programming environments (and accompanying pedagogic techniques) have been developed to help artists, regular folks and other non-computer-scientists learn to make software. Using visual and musical expression as the “hook”, thousands of people have not only learned to code using these new environments, but found new reasons to code in the first place. These toolkits – many of which are free, open-source initiatives – have made enormous inroads towards expanding the computational skills and interests of hundreds of thousands of creative people worldwide. You too can join this movement!

More info here: http://artandcode.ning.com/

The PittMFUG meeting is Today, Thursday January 15, 2009.

It’s our first meeting of the new year and we have some cool things planned!

Flash + Red5 + MIDI, Josh Sager
Josh will demo a set up he has going using the Red5 server to connect Flash to a MIDI instrument. Crazy, huh?

A little bit of Phidgets RFID, Val Head
Val will show how amazingly easy it is to get Phidgets up and running with Flash and how to build a simple app once you have things running.

Thursday January 15th
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 celebrate the Holidays with the PittMFUG last night! I think everyone had a great time playing Guitar Hero, eating food and socializing. Congratulations to Nate who was the big prize winner of the evening! Nate won our grand prize of $2100 worth of Adobe software!

We look forward to seeing all of you at January’s meeting. The list of members will be starting fresh so be sure to show! If you are interested in more pictures from the party you can view them on the PittMFUG photo stream at Flickr.

The PittMFUG meeting is Thursday, December 18th.

The Holidays are here and we’re having an open format meeting to celebrate. Bring a recent project to show, or a Flash question for the group. We’ll have a projector and laptop available if you need it.

But wait, that’s not all!

There will be pizza and beverages provided, courtesy of your PittMFUG managers, and we are giving away software! All the meeting sign ups from the last six months will be entered into the drawing for any CS4 package (with the exception of master collection). You must be present to win.

Please RSVP to pittmfug@gmail.com so we can order enough food.

Meeting details:
Thursday December 18th
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.

Check us out on the Adobe Groups site

Have you seen the PittMFUG page on the Adobe Groups Site? This is a new site that adobe has created for all User Groups. Pretty nice of them, huh?

Suggest a Topic

Do you have a topic you’d like to see covered at a PittMFUG meeting? Do you want to present at a PittMFUG meeting? Send an email to pittmfug@gmail.com and we’ll make it happen.

Thanks to everyone who came out last night. We had a lot more folks than we expected for a mid July meeting. Here are the files and links and such we discussed.

Easy Papervision Panoramic
Download the example files

Some of the links we looked at:
The photo from Flickr
Tutorial this example was based on
Full screen cube panoramic
More on full cube panoramics

Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers
Firebug
http://getfirebug.com/

Flash Tracer
http://www.sephiroth.it/firefox/flashtracer/

Web Developer
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Mac related dev stuff you might want to check out:
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/web-development-with-safari