Adobe MAX is coming up in a few weeks so we thought it would be a good time to get together before the event and make some predictions on what announcements might be made. So, lets get together the Thursday before everyone heads out to L.A. for an informal Meetup.

This Meetup will be sponsored by Portfolio Creative Staffing. Portfolio Creative Staffing is a creative staffing agency located in Columbus specializing in graphic designers, production artists, and web designers. Portfolio staffs creative freelance and full time positions with most agencies here in town. They are a great, personal, staffing resource if you are looking for freelance or full time Flash work or are an agency looking for qualified talent. Chris Cochran from Portfolio will be attending to speak with you about any potential opportunities or answer any questions.

http://www.portfoliostaffing.com/

Pizza, beer, and other drinks will be provided.

See you then.

This month, Lane Kuhlman will be giving us a demonstration on gesture-based interaction design and how the Flash platform can be used to create DIY tangible user interfaces. This is really interesting work and has applications for designers and developers across many industries including art, education, gaming, and entertainment. Lane is a graduate student at Ohio State where she is focusing on her interests in designing multimedia for multi-touch surfaces, tangible media, video motion analysis, and educational gaming.

Lane's presentation will also be a nice precursor to an upcoming Meetup focused on computer vision and using the AR Toolkit in Flash.

As always, food and refreshments will be provided. So, spread the word and we hope to see you next week.

Thanks.

Hi Everyone,

Our next Meetup will be on Thursday, February 5th at tracermedia. We had planned on having Cliff Hall, the creator of PureMVC as our guest but unfortunately Cliff had to reschedule for next months Meetup. So, equally as exciting, Luke Bayes, the co-author of ASUnit and the author of Project Sprouts will be our guest.

Luke is one of the premiere ActionScript developers having co-developed the invaluable ASUnit, written a number of projects for Adobe, co-authored ActionScript and Flash certification exams and study guides, and a number of other projects. Luke has worked on some very large ActionScript projects and has been influential in bringing the concepts of continuous integration and test driven development to ActionScript developers. His latest project, Sprouts, is an open source project generation tool that can really change the way we develop Flash, Flex, Actionscript, and AIR projects. Luke will conference in and tell us all about Sprouts, his latest feature release, and how to achieve continuous integration in ActionScript projects. Luke is a great presenter so this is not to be missed.

Although this is slightly technical in nature we really encourage designers to stop by and hear what Luke has to say. Luke has a great approach to his development work and is as much an artist as he is a developer.

As always food and drinks will be provided. We are really looking forward to seeing all of you again.

Thanks.

http://lukebayes.com/
http://www.projectsprouts.com/

Alright, sorry for the somewhat late notice but August has flown past us. Hope everyone had a great Summer and a good Labor Day weekend. We have a really exciting Meetup lined up for next week so we hope you can all make it over.

First up, Jeremy Patterson will be doing a demo that includes Powerflasher FDT, one of the leading alternative development environments for ActionScript, Flash, and Air. Jeremy's conversational demo will "... go over the landscape of editors to touch on why editors such as Flex Builder, FDT, and potentially intelliJ are taking things to the next level with the incorporation of tools that make Fowler style refactoring easier. So, it's kind of a discussion of refactoring as an idea, but then highlighting the tools that make the process easier." A lot of the tools and concepts that he will talk about may be familiar to developers but designers should also be interested in the demo to see how these things impact or improve the designers workflow. Jeremy is an excellent developer, design, and instructor so this is going to be a great presentation.

Second up, at 7:30, we are really excited to have Frank from PowerFlasher, developers of FDT, joining us on a call from Germany to let us know all about the latest release of FDT and answer our questions. FDT is a plugin for the Eclipse development platform that gives you a robust set of tools including code complete, refactoring, code formatting and a lot more for ActionScript development. FDT has been around the Flash community for a few years now but their latest release has really made it a contender for one of the best ActionScript development environments. This is a great opportunity to get answers right from the source about this great alternative to the Flash and Flex development environments so bring your questions. Also, Frank has graciously offered some significant discounts on FDT to everyone that attends next weeks Meetup.

http://fdt.powerflasher.com/

As usual, drinks and food will be provided. This is going to be another great Meetup so make sure you RSVP and spread the word.

Thanks.

Hopefully you are all planning on making it down to Comfest for some part of your upcoming weekend. If you are interested in an informal, no computers, no wireless, and very little talk of Flash/Flex Meetup let me know. There's a great line up of bands this year especially at the Offramp Stage. I will definitely be there at 2PM on Friday enjoying Teeth of the Hydra (Matt, another Flash/Flex Meetup members band) as well as hanging around the Offramp Stage Friday and Saturday evening.

Let me know if/when you plan on stopping down and we can meet up and chat about some of the plans we have for upcoming Meetups or just enjoy some good music and greasy fair food together.

Hope to see you there.