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, 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 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!
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 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.
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.