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.

Adobe is launching the FlashBuilder 4 and Flash Catalyst Tour in full force! Next week we will be having a joint user group meeting with the Pittsburgh Cold Fusion Users Group for an official pre-release event! Join us at IMPAQT as Adobe sends Adam Lehman, Adobe’s product manager for ColdFusion to talk to us about the advancements in CF, FB and FC! There will be swag, giveaways and food! Make sure you head on over and RSVP for an extra chance at an iPod as well! This is on our normal meeting night so make sure you show up at IMPAQT instead of at New Perspective! Directions and the RSVP form are available at: http://pittsburghadobe.eventbrite.com/

The 2009 Web design and development Spring
Conference is just under two weeks away! To kick things off, we are giving away a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Design Premium to one lucky attendee that registers for the event before June 2. This is valued at over $1500! To be entered, register through our e-commerce site by going to http://sbconference.com and clicking Register Now at the top of the page.

General admission tickets are only $65, students get in for $20. This is an outstanding price for the world-class caliber of Web professionals that will be presenting. For instance, renowned CSS guru and author of “CSS: The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly), Eric Meyer will be giving us all a taste of how JavaScript Will Save Us All. Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt will be teaching us the Top 10 problems with RIA that you never knew existed. Stephanie Sullivan and Greg Rewis, authors of the recently published “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4″ (New Riders) will be delivering our keynote, as well as presenting on topics from CSS to AJAX.

More of a developer than a designer? Join Fusebox core lead Adam Haskell as he dissects this popular web application framework, or learn to incorporate the desktop into your web applications through An Introduction to Adobe AIR 1.5 with Ben Pritchard.
Interested in bringing interactivity to your site through JavaScript? Why not learn from the lead of the jQuery UI build & release team, Richard Worth, as he helps you understand this popular JavaScript library through his hands-on Learning jQuery UI workshop.

This is just a sample, in all 19 Web professionals will present this year.

Visit http://sbconference.com for a full roundup.

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

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.

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!

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