This month, Naveena Swamy from GameBrix.com will be presenting on the GameBrix platform.

Digital Brix Inc.’s GameBrix.com is a web-based Collaboration Platform for easy Flash Game Development. With no software downloads or installs, anyone can realize their creative ideas using a web browser to build, share and play casual games. Anyone can draw, animate, create games, trade game assets with other users and publish games or flash adver-games.

Naveena co-founded DigitalBrix Inc., and RoboTech Center®, Center for Game Design, Robotics & Animation Technologies based in Nashua, NH. She has held positions at IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, Cadence Design Systems, Viewlogic Systems, and Sycamore Networks. Her passion is to research new paradigms in playful learning systems and delivers programs on creating games at the Boston Museum of Science. She is currently working as a co-author on a second book on casual game design, Collaborative Online Game Creation

The meeting will be on Wednesday, April 23, 7:00 p.m. at the NEIA Annex, 303 Boylston Street, Brookline.

A bit late posting this, but Chris Georgenes is presenting at the March meeting, which is this coming Wednesday.

Chris is a brilliant designer, animator, author and public speaker. For those of you who might not know him by name, I am sure you will recognize his work once you see it. His portfolio is at http://www.mudbubble.com and his personal blog at http://www.keyframer.com/.

He is also the author of How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Cheat-Flash-CS3-animation/dp/0240520580/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204215218&sr=8-1

as well as numerous articles and video tutorials on www.adobe.com.

The meeting, as usual, is this Wednesday (March 26) at 7pm(ish) at the NEIA Annex, 303 Boylston Street (Route 9), Brookline, near Brookline Hills T Station.

This month we have a good friend and former coworker of mine, Chuck Freedman. Chuck works for Ribbit (www.ribbit.com) as the Director of User Experience. The Ribbit platform has been getting a lot of attention from the Flash community in recent months with their release of free components for using the Ribbit service to build Flash and Flex telephony apps. Chuck and I worked together a couple of years ago in Boston. He left for the west coast to become the Senior Flash Developer for Yahoo, in charge of Yahoo Maps, just before BFPUG was started, so I’m excited that he can finally come to his first meeting.

Anyway, here’s the official session description:

Straight from 360|Flex (he’ll be flying up straight from Atlanta), Chuck Freedman, Boston native and Director of Ribbit’s Developer Platform, will join us for his first BFPUG.

Chuck, in his 10th year of Flash, will be talking about Ribbit’s exciting and free voice components for Flash, designed to easily add phone calling, voice mail and contact management to any Flash Platform app. Chuck has some cool examples to review and will walk us through creating our first Ribbit app.

Ribbit is launching plans for a first-of-its-kind developer ecosystem in the form of their Amphibian store. Chuck will detail how developers can rapidly build a Ribbit Flash, Flex or AIR app or widget, sell it and continue to make money from it.

He’ll also share with us the details on the growth of Ribbit’s developer community, including the ability to post your apps to other developers and generate feedback.

Meeting is next Wednesday, February 27, at 7:15 pm at the NEIA Annex on Boylston Street.

January’s meeting will be on next Wednesday, the 23rd. Still at the Annex Building near Brookline Hills T-stop.

Michelle Yaiser will be presenting on interaction design and physical computing in Flash. She’ll be showing how to interface with several different pieces of hardware through Flash. Sounds wesome.

Also, Joey Lott has offered to bring over a whole bunch of books to give out. Design Patterns, Cookbooks, and I think AS3 Bibles. I’ll bring along some Making Things Move too. Everyone should be able to get a book or two at least. Sweet deal! See you then!

We are back to regular meetings this month, and have a very cool lineup for the next few months.

January 23 is Michelle Yaiser from the New England Institute of Art.

February 27 is Chuck Freedman from Ribbit.

March 26 is Joe Berkovitz from Allurent.

More details on the presentations when time gets closer.

For now, the meetings will still be at the Annex Building down the street, near the Brookline Hills T Station. There are rumors that we are going to move back to the main campus with a nice new space soon though.

The BFPUG Design Patterns Meeting for January has been pushed up a week. It will be on Wednesday, January 9, 2008, 7:00 p.m. at Brightcove in Cambridge.

A bit late posting this here, but it did go out on the mailing list.

Flash Physics Simulations

by James Battat (Ph.D candidate in Astronomy, Harvard University) and Aaron Gibralter (’07, Physics concentrator)

“We developed a suite of interactive simulations for an introductory physics course in mechanical systems at Harvard University under the Presidential Instructional Technology Fellowship (PITF) Summer Program. With the use of computer simulations, it is possible to teach students about the behavior of complex mechanical systems without trudging through complicated differential equations. We found several canned animations demonstrating physical phenomena on the web, but we noticed a surprising lack of full interactive physics simulation engines. We aimed to fill that void by developing a virtual physics lab using Flash.

“We’ll tell you about our class-based project, demo our simulations, and explain how various components of our software (e.g. a graphing package) could be useful to other projects. ”

715pm at the NEIA Annex:

The address is 303 Boylston. Its just a few minutes west of the main campus. The meeting is on the main floor when you enter.

The closest T stop is Brookline Hills. Go up the steps, turn right and walk towards Boylston. Take a left on Boylston and the building will be on your left.

Parking on Boylston is a mix of public and resident so check the signs.

There is a shuttle (clearly marked NEiA) that runs back and forth, so you can always still come to the main campus and catch the shuttle to the new location

This month’s meeting topic is presented by Scott Janousek.

Flash Lite 3 - Next Generation Flash Mobile

Among topics, Scott will cover:

- What is Flash Lite? - An overview
- Flash Lite Player Evolution
- What’s new? - Flash Lite 3 Features
- Adobe Flash CS3 Mobile Workflow and Toolset
- Walkthrough and Demo(s)
- Q&A

Scott Janousek is Technical Director of Hooken Mobile. Hooken Mobile provides consulting, training, as well as application, game, and content generation services to those looking to utilize Flash within the mobile landscape.

For more detailed information on Scott and his community efforts, please see: http://www.scottjanousek.com/About.html, or his blog at: http://www.scottjanousek.com/blog/

MEETING TIME:
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 7:00 pm.

DIRECTIONS:
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Just a reminder that the meeting will be in the NEiA’s new annex.

The address is 303 Boylston. Its just a few minutes west of the main campus. The meeting is on the main floor when you enter.

The closest T stop is Brookline Hills. Go up the steps, turn right and walk towards Boylston. Take a left on Boylston and the building will be on your left.

Parking on Boylston is a mix of public and resident so check the signs.

There is a shuttle (clearly marked NEiA) that runs back and forth, so you can always still come to the main campus and catch the shuttle to the new location.

This month we have someone we all know and love, a long time member of BFPUG, Doug Martilla!

Doug is Lead Developer at Visual i|o. Visual i|o develops enterprise level data visualization applications for a variety of clients including leading financial, data mining, pharmaceutical, and software companies.

The presentation is “Flash and Data Visualization”

Doug will discuss:

• What questions can be answered by visualizing data?
• What are the advantages and challenges of interactive data vs. static visualization?
• What are the trends driving the current surge in data and information visualization?
• How do you create a visualization using Flash? (walking through code)

Join us Wednesday, September 26 at 7pm, the usual location at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline.

OK, this took a while, but we finally have winners in the Flash on the Beach banner contest. Not just one winner, but two!

Strangely, we had just four entries. I guess because Flash on the Beach is such a great value, people don’t mind paying to go. Actually, if the contest included airfare to England, I think we’d have a lot more entries, but we gotta be realistic.

Anyway, one entry came in a little bit late, so got a consolation prize of a copy of a copy of Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! This was from Josh Csehak:

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.bit-101.com/fotb/fotb_josh.swf” height=”60″ width=”468″ /]

Then we have our two winners, first Derek Tram:

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.bit-101.com/fotb/fotb_derek.swf” height=”60″ width=”468″ /]

And then my personal favorite, from Colby Grenier:

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.bit-101.com/fotb/fotb_colby.swf” height=”60″ width=”468″ /]

Derek and Colby will both be going to Flash on the Beach!

A final mention goes out to Domenick and Chris for their Red5 video chat application banner. This thing is outrageous. Unfortunately, I think it went a bit beyond the bounds of the contest in terms of file size, external connections, etc. Anyway, you can check that out here:

http://www.infrared5.com/ir5/examples/red5/fotb/main.html

Thanks a lot to John Davey, the creator of Flash on the Beach, for his generosity in supporting BFPUG and making the tickets available.