As soon as I’m back from LA I’m going to be opening up one of these babies and experimenting with it myself.

By the way, this is my first trip to California and for the life of me I cannot figure out why everyone doesn’t live here. The streets are palm tree lined. It’s clean, friendly (at least compared to London), it’s 26 degrees C in November, sunny, beautiful and the beaches and the mountains are less than an hour away. Time to relocate I think.

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).

The group is dedicated to beginners and intermediates, as there are already 2 advanced user groups in London for Flash and Flex. But what does that mean? Who should go to the group? Well, broadly speaking, if you can answer ‘yes’ to any of the following then this is the group for you:

• You want to learn Flash development or design.
• You want to progress from actionscript 2 to actionscript 3.
• You want to move from procedural coding to Object Oriented coding.
• You want to learn about UML and pattern based coding.
• You want to learn more of the sexy concept and design techniques made possible by products like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
• You want to learn about video encoding and delivery techniques.
• You want to learn about games programming and design in Flash.
• You want to learn how to deliver your projects using best practices and good process.
• You want an introduction to doing 3D in Flash.
• You want to know about audio in Flash and Soundbooth.
• You want to speak to industry experts about your work, career choices and the latest technology.
• You want to share your latest work and ideas with a group of fellow enthusiasts.
• You want to get into mobile development.
• You want to get real live industry feedback on what technologies and work are being used and done out there.
• You want more…:)

The group meets once a month (the penultimate Thursday of every month) at the South Bank University’s Keyworth Center on the 1st floor. There is just now an Adobe user group official site for it (http://groups.adobe.com/group/815). Everyone is welcome no matter what your background of expertise. It’s a very open and friendly group and if you have knowledge to share then it always welcomed.

If there are topics you’d like to see covered then please let us know as we have the expertise and the connections with Adobe to make it happen. we’ll also be giving away Adobe software from time to time and Friends of Ed have generously donated any amount of excellent books to give out as prizes (or if you’re willing to read them and write a review of the book for the user group site)

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.

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.