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.

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’s meeting topic is presented by Scott Janousek.

Flash Lite 3 - Next Generation Flash Mobile

Among topics, Scott will cover:

- What is Flash Lite? - An overview
- Flash Lite Player Evolution
- What’s new? - Flash Lite 3 Features
- Adobe Flash CS3 Mobile Workflow and Toolset
- Walkthrough and Demo(s)
- Q&A

Scott Janousek is Technical Director of Hooken Mobile. Hooken Mobile provides consulting, training, as well as application, game, and content generation services to those looking to utilize Flash within the mobile landscape.

For more detailed information on Scott and his community efforts, please see: http://www.scottjanousek.com/About.html, or his blog at: http://www.scottjanousek.com/blog/

MEETING TIME:
=============

Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 7:00 pm.

DIRECTIONS:
===========

Just a reminder that the meeting will be in the NEiA’s new 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:

• What questions can be answered by visualizing data?
• What are the advantages and challenges of interactive data vs. static visualization?
• What are the trends driving the current surge in data and information visualization?
• How do you create a visualization using Flash? (walking through code)

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.

I’m happy to announce that Joey Lott will be speaking at this month’s
BFPUG meeting. Joey should need no introduction - author of such books
as the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook, Programming Flex 2, Advanced
ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns, Flash 8 ActionScript Bible, Flash 8
Cookbook, Programming Flash Communication Server, on and on.

The subject of his presentation will be styling and customizing Flex
application appearance, including compile-time and runtime CSS, style
precedence, custom preloaders.

Hope you can join us: this Wednesday, the 25th, 7:30 pm at the New
England Institute of Art, Brookline Village.

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.