BFPUG has a new community site: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/4c0892e788/summary
or, easier to remember: http://icanhaz.com/bfpug
Monthly meetings are still the fourth Wednesday of each month at 7:15 at The New England Institute of Art. Meeting details will be posted on the new site.
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/
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 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!
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 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:
Join us Wednesday, September 26 at 7pm, the usual location at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline.
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
Hot off the presses! Announcing an exciting BFPUG member contest. You can win a ticket to Flash on the Beach! FOTB is one of the most talked about new conferences of 2006, and it’s coming back this year in November, in Brighton, UK. John Davey, the coordinator, is co-sponsoring a contest where you can win a free ticket.
Here are the rules:
1. You have to be a member of BFPUG. But, since we don’t have strict membership requirements, let’s just say that means you have come to at least one regular BFPUG meeting or one BFPUG Design Pattern meeting in the last 12 months.
2. Design a banner with the theme, “I am going to Flash on the Beach!” The banner would ideally be done in Flash, with some kind of animation, and be one of the following standard banner sizes:
Full Banner: 468×60
Half Banner: 234×60
Skyscraper: 120×600
3. Banner should consist of a single SWF file, self contained, so that anyone can put it on their site, and not have any external loading dependencies.
4. SWF should be no bigger than 50 kb in file size.
5. Submit the banner to me, Keith Peters, at kp - at - bit-101.com. We’ll post the entries here on the BFPUG site as they come in.
6. Contest starts… NOW! and ends on June 26th. We’ll announce the winner at the June meeting, June 27th.
Note that this is a conference ticket only. You’ll still have to find your own way across the Atlantic Ocean, and get a hotel room or find someone who will let you crash on their floor. So if you don’t think you can make it, stand aside and give someone who can actually go the chance.
This month at the Boston Flash Platform User Group meeting, I will be delivering the presentation I did at FiTC last month, Apollo Outside the Box. The presentation got an overall feedback rating of 9.16 out of 10, so I guess it went over pretty well. Basically, the presentation is about making Apollo applications that aren’t the usual Flex-based kind of things that most people are coming up with. Games, screensavers, screen toys, widgets, etc.
See you there. Wednesday, May 23, 7:00 pm at New England Institute of Art.