Adobe lay on the drink and the prizes. There’s no entry fee and the only thing you’ll pay for all night is your food if you want some. The games are not played for money and the dealers are used to beginners and give tutorial help during the evening. It’s a great opportunity to learn poker with no risk and surrounded by friends and colleagues. It’s also a great opportunity to meet you peers, potential employers or potential employees (and you’ll get the chance to see how they operate under pressure).

June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers

June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan

June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize 

June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones

June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha

June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha

June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn 

Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty 

Learn more and register today.

But wait, I hear you say, there’s already the London Flash Platform User Group (LFPUG) run by Tink in Clerkenwell Road and the Flex London User Group (FLUG) in Brick Lane run by Mike Jones and Drew Martin. Both do an awesome and tireless job in showing what boundaries people are pushing in the Flash Platform world, so who needs another Flash user group? …Right? …WRONG!

LFPUG and FLUG are both high end development groups, catering for those who know the Flash Platform well and want to explore the higher end of it’s capabilities and methodologies. The very nature of the people who attend and run these groups ensures that they are advanced user groups and I know I find them very informative, but no one group can be all things to all men.

What’s been missing for a very long time is a group that caters specifically for beginners and intermediates: those who want to learn or improve their understanding of the Flash Platform (Flash, Flex, FMS etc) in a development and design capacity. Those who are trying to swap to Flash platform technologies, those who are learning them on their digital media courses but want real world experience or those who have mastered many of the basics but now want to move on to real world application of that knowledge. This user group is the nursery for user groups like LFPUG and FLUG. It also caters for designers as well as developers and as I believe very strongly that Flash platform developers should have an appreciation of both development and design, this seems like a well balanced beginner and intermediate group.

If you want to understand things like:

• Patterns,
• OOP,
• moving from AS2 to AS3,
• how to begin using Flex,
• how to start to work with video and audio in Flash and FMS,
• how XML and E4X work,
• how to do your first Augmented Reality piece,
• what best practices you should follow,
• how to work with 3rd party hardware like the Wii,
• getting started with 3D,
• code for designers

and much more, then this is definitely the group for you.

Better still, make a request for a topic to be covered (design or development). There’s a lot of sharing goes on to, with people being encouraged to show the group any work or solutions they have made. It’s an open and friendly forum. No judging and lots of support.
The group meets once a month, normally around the middle of the month. They have a fantastic set up: meeting rooms, over head projectors and several networked labs at their disposal. The group can and will be running workshops along side presentations so you’ll be able to get your hands dirty with real code and design and take them home to play with after. There are prizes to: Apress/ Friends of Ed have kindly agreed to give us books on Flash platform technologies to give away on the night.
The beginner and intermediate community is huge and poorly catered for. This Meetup group group addresses that gap. If you want to learn or improve your Flash-craft then go check out the group. Sign up, and come along.

Reed Professional Services have generously given us a ticket to Flash on the Beach to give away. Yes, just give away! They’re crazy here at Crazy ReedPS! They don’t want your name or your phone number or your bank account details or to know if “you know someone else” who does your job who IS available even though you’re not. Nope, none of that. Just email us here at Logic Bureau and tell us who you are, what you do and that you can go to Flash on the Beach on Monday 21st thru Wednesday 23rd and it’s yours. Obviously it does NOT come with travel or accommodation so don’t ask. We’ll pick a name out of the hat tomorrow evening and email the winner. This ticket will be in your name so it’s non transferable.

In case you don’t know, Flash on the Beach is sold out now so this is one of your last chances to go.

Incase you’re wondering who Reed Professional Services are, they’re not Reed Recruitment, but they are one of the sponsors at Flash on the Beach.

Mike and Andrew opened the meeting by telling us all about what they hoped FLUG would do and then opened the floor to the community to say what they’d like the FLUG to be. There were lots of valid and interesting requests. My personal favorite being a dance off format for Adobe and Microsoft evangelists to pitch their wares. Like a Presidential debate with beer and weapons. Works for me…okay, maybe that one only happened in MY head, but it’s a good idea right?

I think the group will work very well and the organisers are opening up the forum to employers as well as the community. They want to build a community in which networking is encouraged for the good of all members and the good of advancing the Flex platform in all it’s guises. The Logic Bureau employs this exact same approach so we have to say, we fully support the new Flex London User Group and it’s organisers.

If you weren’t there then get along to the next one. It’s well run, a great venue, the members are friendly and they genuinely want the community to drive the group. This is exactly the right sort of organic approach to get the best out of everyone and end up on the leading edge all the time. I think some really interesting stuff will come out of this group and there’s a definite drive to help developers who are new to Flex to learn from the old pros (that sounded ok in my head). We will definitely be attending FLUG on a regular basis.

Is any of this in the Adobe road map? Likely, no, but we can all dream.

• Open source Flash Player
• Language agnostic – more languages compiling to ABC. Alchemy has shown the way, lets build upon it.
• Two tier development model, allowing for rapid prototypes, while also allowing for high end RIAs.
  • Scripting language for the timeline – Further enhancements to AS2 with new capabilities making it simpler for designers to continue to build simple RIAs/Websites/Interactions while allowing them to keep up with industry trends).
  • Application language for RIAs – Further enhancements to AS3, making way for AS4, which could progress away from the ECMAScript standard, and start heading towards a more hybrid route combining the best of Java, .Net, and ECMAScript.
• Multi-threading – Allow us to spawn a thread, Pixel Bender could be used here, but reduce the entry barrier by allowing developers to use AS would benefit everyone in the community.
• Multi-touch – a must have when it comes to FP10 on mobiles.
• Fix the NetStream issue whereby seeking between the first two indexed keyframes in an MPEG-4 AVC encoded video causes IE to crash.
• Better documentation of the SWF file format – currently the documentation is missing vital elements, such as Vector.
• Replace documentation with an open Wiki – Currently a lot of information is spread across blogs, Blueprint makes an attempt to bring this all into a central location while working in Flex, but a central Adobe Wiki would make a lot more sense for Adobe (Crowd sourcing documentation), and the end users.
• Fonts – Embedding fonts in a SWF is great, but wouldn’t it be great if you could use a normal font file, which is restricted via domain (similar to EOT, Embedded OpenType).
• Hardware acceleration
• Private Constructors – there are cases when Singletons are appropriate, why should we have to hack these in.
• Better integration with other CS products, for example importing a Photoshop file with filters and text, retains the same text quality, and filters. Catalyst makes important steps towards this, but there could be improvements.
• ActionScript support server side, via an Apache mod, or more importantly Coldfusion.
• Better code editing within the Flash IDE – this has been promised for CS5.
• A better “Flash Player Settings Panel”
• Lower level access to video and audio.
• Extension “App Store” – An Adobe vetted extension store, which allows developers to submit native extensions and get them signed by Adobe for use in the Flash Player via “Adobe Flash Player Enhancement” – similar to Octoshape’s P2P video streaming plug-in.
  Uses could include:
  • Augmented reality
  • Peer 2 Peer
  • Hardware integration (RFID, Barcode scanners, Arduino etc)
• Native support, and tools, for multi-lingual websites and translation – XLIFF support

Any other suggestions?

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