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.

Our June Meeting will feature a new speaker, but a regular attendee of BFPUG, Todd Yard.

I personally have known Todd since the earliest days of my Flash career, when we’d answer questions and share funky ActionScript 1.0 code on Flashkit and Were-Here. We’ve also worked together on a number of books for Friends of ED, as co-authors and an author/tech reviewer team. He is one of the authors of the highly acclaimed “Object Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8″ and the upcoming “Object Oriented ActionScript 3.0″. And for the last year, we have been co-workers at Brightcove. So it’s about time I tapped him to speak at the user group!

Here’s the official bio and presentation description:

Todd is currently a Senior Software Engineer at Brightcove in Cambridge, where he has been working for the past two and a half years on “the future of Internet television”, dedicating the majority of his time on leading the development of the Flash-based video player client, backend templating system and developer APIs. Before Boston, Todd was in NYC working as a partner with Ego7 on the their Flash CMS and collaborative application suite while freelancing on projects for companies like GE, IBM and Mars. He has contributed as an author to over 10 friends of ED books on Flash as well as providing numerous tutorials to Web Designer and Practical Web Projects magazines.

For the presentation, Todd will take a brief nostalgic look at some cool projects past before offering a peek at his current, exciting work at Brightcove, where he is busy architecting the next generation of the Brightcove players, taking advantage of the new Flash player AVM and ActionScript 3.0 to create an open-ended templating system that will make it a cinch for developers to deliver truly customized video experiences.

The meeting will be Wednesday, June 27, 7:00 pm, at the New England Institute of Art.

See you there!

Keith

Just an update on this month’s meeting…

Chris Allen has just posted some teaser screenshots of some of the stuff John Grden will probably talk about. Wicked cool stuff!

Check it out.

We’re also planning a little get-together afterwards, most likely at Flan O’Brien’s on Tremont Street in Brigham Circle. It’s pretty close to NEIA. Come join us after the presentation for a beer or two, some snacks and good conversation!

When BFPUG was started we had also hoped to start up a Design Patterns sub group that would get together and talk about patterns monthly. Well now that BFPUG is off to a great start the sub group “Patterns” is going to have its first meeting April 5th, 7pm at Brightcove. This group will be more of a round table discussion rather than having one presenter talk. Brightcove has also offered to buy us pizza and drinks for the meeting. Thank you Brightcove and come join us for the first meeting!

Directions

Here’s the video of last night’s meeting:

neia.aiiradio.com

Click on “Watch or Listen” up at the top and you’ll see the BFPUG link there.

Looks like it starts a few minutes into my speech, but not much. Enjoy!

The topic for the February 22nd meeting will be Flash Lite 2, presented by Scott Janousek and Alessandro Pace. Flash Lite 2 has some great new features, and mobile devices are definitely going to be a hot topic for Flash developers over the next few years.

Scott and Alessandro will show us what Flash Lite 2 is capable of and some real world examples.

Again, the meeting is Wednesday, Feb 22, 2006, at 7:00 p.m. at the New England Institute of Art, Brookline Village. Directions are in this post: http://www.bfpug.com/?p=11.

The January Meeting is on January 18, 2006 at 7:00 p.m. at Adobe in Newton.

That’s at 275 Grove Street, next to the Riverside T Station on the Green Line.

A couple of high level Adobe speakers will be presenting to us on some relevant Flash Platform topics, and Adobe is providing some food and drinks. Let’s bring a big crowd there.