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.

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!

It’s time for the May meeting! This Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 6:30pm.
We have some new Adobe swag to give away AND one ticket to Flashbelt to raffle off at the meeting

We two presentations planned for this week:

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

Joe will show the process behind his twitpic Flash app. His app displays the most recent uploads to the twitpic site in a grid. He’ll talk about his challenges working with twitter feeds and JSON to make it all happen and load in images from external sites. This is an intermediate developer presentation.

SWFAddress set up for AS3, Val Head

When you’re building an all-Flash site SWFAddress is a great way to keep the browser back button functional and not frustrates your users. But getting it set up takes a little more effort than you think, especially when working with AS3. Val will walk through the steps of getting SWFAddess set up and working with both AS3 and SWFObject, too. This is an intermediate developer presentation.

Thursday May 21st
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 event in June
On Thursday June 18th we’ll be teaming up with the Cold Fusion group for an Adobe sponsored meeting. Adobe is doing a User Group Tour to talk about the new versions of Flex and Cold Fusion. Have you read about the name change to Flash Builder? That’s just part of the news.

There will be food, giveaways and a speaker coming from Adobe! Mark you calendar for Thursday, June 18th. (That’s our usual meeting Thursday if you’re wondering.) More info on that to come in our June newsletter.
Flash Events!
There’s a whole lot of Flash-related events coming up. If you’re looking for some inspiration or looking to learn something new, check out these events:
Spring < br / > – Athens, OH – June 9, 2009
Spring < br/ > Entering its seventh year, The Spring < br / > Conference will once again be happening in Baker Center, on the beautiful campus of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

This is an all-day event on June 9 filled with several different tracks covering a variety of contemporary Web-related topics. There’s a great list of speakers coming to this event, including the PittMFUG’s own Ben Pritchard.

Flashbelt 2009 – Minneapolis, MN – June 7 – 10, 2009
The annual Flashbelt conference brings a few hundred designers and developers together in Minneapolis to get their geek on. Attendees mix, mingle and learn from a cadre of rock-star designers, whiz-kid developers, and best-selling authors. These industry leaders give presentations and lead workshops on an array of timely technology topics.

Flashpitt 09 – Pittsburgh, PA – Oct 15-16, 2009
Flashpitt 09 is coming up in a few months. Flashpitt is your chance to get away form the daily grind of client work to be inspired and learn without going too far from home. We’ve started announcing our speakers list and tickets will be going on sale June 1st, 2009. Join our mailing list or follow us on twitter for the most up-to-date info.

April Meeting

The PittMFUG meeting is this Thursday April 16th at 6:30pm

So, it’s finally Spring. About time, huh? In honor of the awesomeness that is warmer weather, we’re changing our meeting format for this month.

Our April meeting will feature a mini-presentation format. We’ll be covering a whole lot of topics for just a few minutes at a time. Perfect for getting that little bit of extra info or learning about something entirely new.

Also, we’re bringing back “Show Cool Stuff Time”. The first 15 minutes of the meeting are dedicated to sharing cool sites, inspiring blog posts or whatever else has caught your interest this month. Everyone who brings a link to show at “Show Cool Stuff Time” will get an extra raffle entry.

We have four mini-presentations planned, and we’d like to have more. If you have something you’d like to show or demo for a quick five minute mini-presentation, email pittmfug@gmail.com to let us know.

Full Screen Flash Under HTML, Val Head

One ColorPicker Component, Two Things Changing Colour,Val Head

Working with the Proximity Manager Class, Ben Pritchard

Working with the JPEG and PNG Encoder, Ben Pritchard

The PittMFUG meeting is this Thursday, November 20th.

We have two presentations planned for Thursday night:

Bluetooth Role Call, Ben Pritchard
Ben will demo roomware, a cool open source server with AS3 APIs. If you have a bluetooth device bring it to the meeting and make sure it’s set to discoverable! This is an intermediate to advanced session.

Birds of a Feather Animate Together, Val Head
Nothing says working together like a cliche rhyming title, right? Val will show one way to use Flash and After Effects together to get effects you can’t get with Flash alone. This is an intermediate presentation.

If you know you’re coming, email pittmfug@gmail.com to RSVP.

Meeting details:
Thursday November 20th
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.

We wanted to remind everyone that the September meeting is not tomorrow, it’s next Thursday September 25th. We’ve moved the date to bring you a special meeting.

Be one of the first to see the next big thing from Adobe on September 25th. Join in to see and hear first hand how something very special will help you get to brilliant faster. Save the date and get a good look at what’s to come.

We even have a nice new box of swag to give away at the meeting, so you don’t want to miss this one!

Meeting details:
Thursday September 25th
6:30pm
at New Perspective
google maps

We had a good turnout last meeting. Val talked about the upcoming FlashPitt conference and brought pizza for everyone. There’s a great lineup of speakers. Hope you can join us. If you haven’t already, buy your tickets here. Early bird discounts still available til Sept. 5th.

I talked about creating dynamic Flash layouts using a static Stage positioning class. You can download the source code here. And for those that attended… yes, I fixed the html so it actually shows it working!

Felix Lloyd, president of Skill-Life, Inc. mentioned he is currently looking for Flash developers for their “CentsCity” product. You’ll find the complete job listing on our Yahoo group site.

Also, Patrick and Isaac passed along this link to us. If you haven’t yet seen the SMW Photography site out of the UK, take a look. Choose Visit Site and check out the cloth effect with the photos. Nice job.

- Wayne