Spring is in the air and May 6th we’ll be celebrating with some Flexcover. Al Manning of Brightcove will be showing us how he improved his code coverage with Flexcover. Arrive early if you want pizza. See you all then.
This meeting is held @ Brightcove One Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 on the 12th floor and starts @ 7pm.
This month, we are happy to bring back local celebrity, Chris Georgenes. Actually, we were planning to bring him back last month, but we got snowed out.
Back when Flash CS4 was released, I gave a quick overview of it. But Chris has dived far deeper into the program and will be able to show off a lot more than I could.
The meeting is Wednesday, Feburary 25th at NEIA main campus - Brookline Village. Remember, we’re not in the annex building up by Brookline Hills any more.
You can find out more about Chris at his blog: http://www.keyframer.com/ or his company site: http://www.mudbubble.com/
Heads up on the October meeting: Chris Florio from NEiA will be speaking. Here’s the official info:
NEiA Web Design and Interactive Media faculty member Chris Florio will be giving a demonstration of the new video and interactive graphics features in Flash CS4 and demonstrating the new Adobe Media Encoder CS4. Chris is the author of the new “ActionScript 3 for Flash CS4 Classroom in a Book” published by Adobe Press.
The meeting will be on Wednesday, October 22, 7:00 pm (ish).
Remember, the location is back to the main campus of NEiA, right in Brookline Village!
This month, Chris Allen will present on Building Red5 Applications.
For those of you who don’t know what Red5 is, check http://osflash.org/red5
He’ll also be covering the Jedai Framework and new tools released with that. I’ve gotten personal demos of these things, and it’s pretty amazing how easy it makes it to set up Red5 and build a fully functioning app from scratch. If you’ve ever thought about doing any kind of live streaming / multi-user / conferencing apps, but thought it was too hard, definitely come check this out!
Take your Flash and Flex applications to the next level. Add streaming video, live interactivity and push technology to your projects, all using the acclaimed open source Red5 Flash server. Project leader Chris Allen will walk attendees though building a Red5 application using the new Jedai Framework (http://jedai.googlecode.com). They will learn how to harness the power of RTMP in Flash to build cutting edge content including multi-user games, live video chat and more.
The meeting is Wednesday, July 23, 7:00 pm at the NEIA Annex, 303 Boylston Street, Brookline.
This month, Joe Berkovitz of Allurent will be presenting on a personal obsession: real-time audio synthesis and music creation, implemented in Flash.
Flash is known for its audio playback and streaming capabilities, but one can also synthesize sound directly, by generating and playing raw audio samples purely in ActionScript 3. Joe will walk through the rather devious means required to accomplish this in today’s Flash 9 Sound API, discuss its strengths and limitations, and will show some sample code that exploits this capability. He’ll take a look at the just-released Sound capabilities in Flash Player 10 (Astro) which greatly ease the difficulty of working with synthesized sound, and will also present a look at some new kinds of music application enabled by these techniques, still under development, highlighting some of the technical and architectural challenges involved in their construction.
The meeting will be on Wednesday, May 28 at the NEIA Annex building, 303 Boylston Street.
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:
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.