Next Wednesday we will be going over the Factory pattern. I’ll be starting the talk with a brief overview and example. If you are coming and have examples of the Factory pattern from your own work you are welcome to bring them. As usual this is a open discussion so come prepared to ask questions and talk to others about your thoughts on the pattern. After the meeting we’ll be grabbing a drink at Characters right under Brightcove. See you all there.

Meeting time and location: Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 7:00 p.m. at Brightcove.

I’ve been thinking about what to do for the May meeting. I wanted to do something a little less technical, and a little more creative. I didn’t have any volunteers, so I decided to take it on myself. At FiTC last week, I did a presentation on the BitmapData class in Flash 8. It went over really well. In fact, here is what Mike Chambers from Adobe had to say about it:

Mike Chambers Podcast Excerpt

(The full podcast can be found at http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2006/04/podcast_april_2.cfm)

Basically, I go over some background on bitmaps vs. vectors, then walk through some of the functions you can use to make and manipulate bitmaps in Flash 8, then present a whole bunch of really cool examples.

I want to make this the biggest BFPUG meeting ever. So put this on your calendar!

Meeting time and location: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 7:00 p.m. at NEIA.

Last nights meeting was a bit smaller than others, but still went very well. Chris Allen presented about the open source Flash server, Red5. He showcased an application that created a video conference with several of the Red5 developers around the world.

For more information about the Red5 project, check out http://www.osflash.org/red5 .

And you will soon be able to see the whole broadcast at http://neia.aiiradio.com/ .

Thanks to Doug and visual-io for providing food and drink.

Just want to remind everyone that the meeting will be broadcast live at the following URL:

http://neia.aiiradio.com/

Just click on “Watch or Listen” and a window will pop up with the available shows. It will also be on line after the fact.

For those of you who use Google Calendar or any other iCal-based calendar, I set up a public Google Calendar for the BFPUG meetings. Here are the feeds:

iCal Address

RSS Feed

If you are using Google Calendar, go to Manage Calendars, Other Calendars, Add Calendar. Then go to Public Calendar Address and paste the iCal address from above into the field. It should add all the meetings to your calendar.

The RSS feed should work with any RSS reader.