Time For Change - An Evolution
In the words of Dr. Heywood R. Floyd and Dave Bowman:
Heywood Floyd: What? What's going to happen?
Dave Bowman: Something wonderful.
For those of you that don't get the 2001/2010 Space Odyssey references, please consider this a quick heads up:
In the coming weeks, we will be announcing some new meetings, along with some
BIG and
EVOLUTIONARY changes for the group as a whole.
2012 should be pretty interesting. Get ready for the reboot!
Posted: 01.30.2012 - 10:23pm
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CreativeJS and HTML5 Workshop with Seb Lee-Delisle In October
Seb Lee-Delisle is coming to Philly as part of a tour through the East Coast. He will be hitting DC and NY in addition to Philly. Tickets just went on sale today at noon for his
Creative JS and HTML5 Workshop (which will certainly sell out fast - don't wait!) , here are the details for the Philly Stop:
Monday October 24th and Tuesday October 25th 2011
http://creativejstour4philly.eventbrite.com/
General Training Info
In-browser graphical capabilities are becoming richer than ever, and you can now create truly beautiful visual effects with JavaScript and HTML5.
Come and learn how to draw, animate, and create truly interactive content, including advanced mouse interactions, pixel manipulation, image blending, physics, 3D and games .
This two day workshop will help you over the learning curve by showing you some simple techniques that can really improve responsiveness, performance.
Ticket Info:
Tickets start at $899 for two full days of training
($300 discount for freelancers! Use the INDIELOVE discount code)
Posted: 09.22.2011 - 10:56am
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Adobe MAX 2011 and Local Recap Meeting in October
Adobe MAX 2011 is almost upon us with everything going down the first week of October. MAX looks to be pretty interesting this year with plenty of cool stuff and surprises waiting for attendees. We will be there, and plan on having a local Philadelphia meeting recapping highlights and info for those of you who couldn't make it. We haven't set a date yet, however we are shooting for a week or two after MAX is over, probably the week of the 17th in October. If you are going to be attending MAX and would like to come to our recap meeting and share your highlights, please feel free. This meeting will be super casual and we may even break down into smaller focus groups depending on the turnout and areas of interest. Stay tuned for finalized info on the date and location, coming soon....
Quick update - already lots of interesting news coming from Adobe leading up to MAX - have posted a recap of many of the announcements here:
You Know Adobe MAX 2011 is Near - Goodies Start to Arrive
Posted: 09.16.2011 - 10:45am
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Philly Merge - Friday July 15th
Hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far!
You may have heard about a new conference starting up right here in Philly,
Philly Merge - taking place next Friday July 15.
We’re excited to be able to offer a discount to Adobe User Group members thanks to
Adobe's sponsorship of the event.
Tickets are normally priced at $29, but by using a special discount code for registered members of our group, you can save 50%!
To get the discount code,
contact us.
Philly Merge is all about bringing together locals from both technical and business backgrounds to mingle, socialize,
learn about starting and running businesses -- and what that means in Philly specifically -- and having fun.
It all goes down on Friday, July 15th at Penn.
A great line up of
speakers and sessions. I'll be speaking about Adobe AIR/Flash CS 5.5 workflow tricks, and Adobe's
Terry Ryan will be discussing Flex/AIR/Mobile - should be a great time!
Learn more and
register at
phillymerge.com
Register ASAP, they want to be sure they have the right size shirt for you!
We hope to see you there!
(more)
Posted: 07.06.2011 - 10:46am
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May 26th Meeting - Mobile Madness : Developing for iOS & Android - A PANMA educational event
As a follow up to our last
PFPAUG meeting in February on mobile, I'll be presenting on new features of Flash CS 5.5 and AIR for developing mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices. I'll be doing this in conjunction with one of our fellow Philly tech groups,
PANMA (the panma.org site currently down, but panma.net is available), on May 26th. There were so many things I so badly wanted to share back at our February meeting, but couldn't, however the cat is out of the bag now that the Adobe CS 5.5 Suite is shipping, so we can give you the low down, highlights and examples. I'll personally be giving the first public sneak preview on a couple personal mobile projects and some client work, to help delve into the new features. Very excited about sharing those.
Joe Kaufmann from
http://www.firemaplegames.com/ will also be presenting about his experience with developing games for the iOS and Android markets with
GameSalad,
Corona and HTML5 for mobile devices. Joe has had a lot of success with GameSalad, and Corona is a really compelling solution (especially for folks familiar with Lua). So this should be a pretty imformative event with quite a lot to cover since our
Mobile Development Demystified event from over a year ago just before CS5 shipped, and even from our PFPAUG meeting in February on mobile.
More info on PANMA's site here:
http://www.panma.net/organization/news/2011/05/mobile-madness-developing-for-ios-android-on-526
and the official EventBrite signup for registration here (space is limited):
http://panma.eventbrite.com/
DATE/TIME:
Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 5:30 PM (ET)
LOCATION:
UPENN/Wharton School of Business - John M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Walnut Street
Room G-55
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Google Maps -
Yahoo Maps -
MapQuest -
BIng Maps
Hope to see you all there!
Posted: 05.10.2011 - 6:20pm
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February Meeting Date: Thursday, 24th 2011 - Flash: Mobile and Devices
Happy to announce we have a date, time, location and agenda with some greats speakers for our next meeting. A special shoutout and thank you to our friends at
Newgrounds.com for providing the location for our meeting:
DATE:
Thursday, February 24th
TIME:
6:30PM-9:00PM
LOCATION:
NOTES: Red brick building, approx. 3 blocks up the street from the Glenside train station, on the same side of the street as the train station. There is limited parking at Newgrounds office, but additional parking is available in or near the SEPTA lot. There is also plenty of street parking on Glenside Ave and Easton Rd. iSepta is a great mobile resource for train schedules.
AGENDA/TOPICS/SPEAKERS:
Flash: Mobile and Devices in 2011We will be covering the following:
- Flash CS5 and iOS/iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Development
- Flash CS5 and Android Development
- Introduction to the Google Market and the Amazon App Store
- Derek Wischusen on Flex/AIR and the Blackberry Playbook Tablet
- Arpit Mathur on comparisons of Cocoa/Objective-C Development to Flash CS5/AS3 Packager for iOS
- Dan Marcolina will be covering creating mobile applications with Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite and info about his new book iPhone Obsessed
Our generous hosts at
Newgrounds.com will also be filling us in on what they are up to, and we may have a few other surprises. :)
RSVP:
Space is limited so, please
RSVP here so we can get a handle on headcount.
There should be plenty of lively discussion. Hope to see many of you there to help us kick off our series of 2011 meetings in style.
Posted: 02.14.2011 - 07:11am
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Android Version of PhillyGeekCentral Now Available
I finally spent a few minutes and published an
Android version of PhillyGeekCentral. It's based on the exact
same AS3/Flash CS5 code that I wrote for original iOS/iPhone version, with just a few minor tweaks. (I'll be updating the repository on Github to include the Android based tweaks, as soon as I get a chance).
I really only had a chance to test it on my Nexus One, so it may be be a bit funky, and not lay out as nicely on other Android devices or tablets, but I'll make sure to address that in version 1.1 that I am working on. Feel free to
send comments and feedback my way. I just wanted to get something out the door to motivate me to get going with cleaning it up, polishing it, and to work on the next version. I put it together with the very first beta of the Packager for iPhone in 2009, and once Apple banned that for a while early last year with changes to their Developer SDK agreement that everyone knows about, I pretty much hadn't let it languish until last September when they lifted the ban and approved an update. Now that's behind us and Adobe is working on the Packager to have parity with the rest of AIR for Devices, it motivated me to get going on it again. I also thought it would be a good tie in for our next meeting on mobile/devices and Flash, which I am nailing the new date down shortly.
The app is available now in the Android Market,
link can be found on this page I also submitted it to the the Amazon App store, and it's currently under review. There are
some issues with AIR for Android and Amazons App Store that Adobe and Amazon are hashing out, so it may not get approved their right away - will update things when it is.
The plan is for 1.1 to have a solid codebase with improved views, touch/swipe controls for both iOS, Android and Playbook devices in one branch with some conditional compilation directives, and then version 1.2 will finally introduce support for other local Adobe User Groups in the area. The roadmap for 1.3 is to then add support for other select local tech groups (along with a WordPress plugin), and then finally in 1.4 or perhaps 2.0, configureable group selection. Lots of clean up and optimizing to do first, especially around touch/swipe controls - which I am just not happy with right now (and have a totally different approach I am going to leverage) - but it's at least functional.
I am not 100% certain of is how I'll optimize the UI and extra real estate for iPad and Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy, and the upcoming BlackBerry Playbook and other larger form factor devices. I may come up with a totally different layout and views. The UI itself was originally designed to mimic that of the iPhone/iOS which was originally a Cocoa/Xcode app before I ported it over to AS3. However, I may also move away from that entirely with the Android and Blackberry versions. The icon could certainly be a lot nicer to - all things I pretty much skimped on getting it out the door originally back when the iPhone Packager was still in beta and before Apple dropped the hammer on things. Lots to ponder and tweak now that things are much further along.
Another related topic I wanted to touch on, and will get into more detail in our next meeting, is how incredibly easy it was to take the iPhone version I developed and tweak it just a bit for Android, that literally only took about an hour, mainly due to the different size dimensions of the Nexus One versus iPhone's and their PPI differences, which again are not fully accounted for, but werent accounted for at all in the original iPhone version. I also added a few other minor Android specific items. Debugging and working with AIR for Android in Flash CS5, is so much easier, and faster than my original experience with the Packager for iPhone, but Adobe is really working hard to give everything parity and polish for the next release.
The biggest difference for me, was more about the developer portals and not so much my local developer tools. I was blown away by how incredibly simple it was to use the Google Android Market, and Amazons AppStore Developer Portal to submit the .APK files for publishing. It literally took me less than 5 minutes to sign up for each of them and get my accounts created, and since I had all my assets ready, filling out the forms, and submitting the icons, screenshots and .APK file also took less than 5 minutes. The Android Market place had my app up by the time I picked up my device and did a search for it. Amazon has a more Apple like review process, and as I mentioned there are potential issues with AIR for Android apps that needs to be ironed out - but overall but processes were so much more streamlined than working with Apples iOS Developer portals. To be fair, I've used Apple's stuff enough for it to be old hat, and they have made a lot of progress since it first opened, but for beginners out there, Google and Amazons dev portals are much more approachable and easier to use. Apple could take some lessons here.
I also love that you can now browse the Android Market on the web and push files to your device - same thing with Amazon's app store - Apple is half way there - in that you can at least browse apps on the web, but you still get pushed to iTunes. It would be nice if you could also do a push that would queue up a download in the app store on your device - think about that Apple!
Since my next task is to finish up a Blackerry Playbook version of the app, its worth noting that Blackberry's Developer/Vendor portal thing is absolutely terrible, and even worse when compared to Apple, Google or Amazon's developer portals. As of right now I can't even login to my account, and their validation sounds like its just as backwards as Apples process is for corporations. The site is completely confusing, redundant and overworked, in some cases simply doesn't work - and even requires Internet Explorer or Firefox only! What year is this anyway? Just a terrible experience overall, they really could do a lot better, and as much as they are embracing the Adobe/Flash community and opening their doors to developers - they need to improve their portal and developer offerings. Also their developer costs for submitting apps (granted they are free for a short amount of time) are geared at enterprise developers (not to unsurprising given their past focus) but I feel they need to rethink this as well going forward and make it more on par with Apple, Google, etc. More on this at our next meeting.
In any case, at least those of you with Android 2.x devices can play along now and keep up with our group from your device. :)
Posted: 02.04.2011 - 2:09pm
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Little Wins is Looking for a Contract Flash Developer
Our Co-Manager and good friend
J. Marziani and his company
Little Wins are looking for a contract Flash Developer to work with them out of
Indy Hall for approx. 3 months - interested?
Check out the craiglist posting for more details.
Posted: 02.03.2011 - 08:10am
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Write a Playbook App, earn bonuses for our Group!
We had been remiss in posting details about a contest that Adobe recently extended the deadline for, where writing an AIR app for the Blackberry Playbook could get some cool bonuses for our group. The original deadline was Feb 1, now it's Feb 28th. Get those apps in and then fill out this
form.
This ties in perfectly with our mobile development meeting that has been moved to February.
If you write and submit a Blackberry Playbook application (using Adobe AIR) before the product launch then RIM will give you a free Playbook [official details]…
Adobe had made the offer even better:
- Every Adobe User Group that submits at least one application will get an extra software raffle (up to $2,100) for 2011 (so 3 instead of 2)
Ten submitters drawn at random will get a free license for Flash Builder 4 Premium ($699 value)
- Three user groups get "a new mobile device" (no clarification on what device… for all I know it could be a phone, a Playbook or a Samsung Galaxy Tab) to raffle off at a meeting.
Applications must be submitted before February 28, 2011! Once you have completed the submission process to Blackberry AppWorld,
fill out this form to enter Adobe's raffle. (Don't forget to enter that you're a member of Philly Flash Platform Group!)
Feel free to reply to this post with comments to let other group members know what kind of apps you're working on or would like to see created, or find people to collaborate with — feel free to say that you are interested in helping or are in search of help for your project.
For anyone interested in Playbook development, here is a collection of useful links:
Webcasts:
Useful Links:
Posted: 01.28.2011 - 06:34am
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