CS4 Winner!

Congratulations to Harris Toser, CPAUG member, who won a copy of Adobe CS4 valued at over $1000 at our May meeting on Flex 3!  We also raffled off Adobe Flex 3 Training from the Source and How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS4. 

Want to win great software, books and other prizes?  Then join CPAUG (it's free!) and attend a meeting:  http://groups.adobe.com/groups/11e8f51bb7/summary

Cool Website: PrintFriendly

I found this site the other day and thought I'd share it with you. To put it plainly, this site let's you put in a URL and it will make that website print friendly. That's it! Simple and useful.

http://www.printfriendly.com/

Catch the "Google Wave"

Thursday Google anounced their new, Open Source project Google Wave.

From their website:

"Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time."

More info:

http://wave.google.com/

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

Book: The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation"

Building communities is vital today, whether it's to support a software project, an online site, or a company. With The Art of Community, you'll discover how online communities can provide you with a reliable support network, a valuable source of new ideas, and a powerful marketing tool -- important commodities at any time, but especially when money is tight.

You'll learn about the broad range of talents required to recruit members, motivate and manage them, and make them happy to be part of your community. The book takes you through each stage of community building, from acquiring the right software tools to learning conflict resolution skills, and teaches you how to:

-Establish sustainable processes for management
-Acquire useful tools and infrastructure
-Build buzz around your project
-Measure aspects of community success
-Handle conflict management
-Manage live events
-Make your community scalable

In this book, author Jono Bacon offers a collection of experiences, observations, and thoughts from his decade-long involvement in building and managing communities for open source software. Currently, he's the Community Manager for Ubuntu, arguably the largest community in the open source software arena. His relationships with other community managers, along with his own experience, provide a rich and deep well of expertise for The Art of Community.

Save $50 on Adobe Suites by chosing the Download option (instead of disks)

http://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?store=OLS-US

Papervision3D Training from the Source - NYC

Dates: June 29th - June 30th, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm (~8 classroom hours a day)

Instructor: John Lindquist

Price: $499

Max Students: 50

Location: Hotel Pennsylvania - New York City - 401 7th Ave, New York, NY 10001 (map)

Discount Code:  Email "cpaugManager@gmail.com" to get a special 10% OFF discount code.  Must be a CPAUG member.

Official Papervision3D training from the guys who developed Papervision3D. We’ll cover everything to getting you started with Papervision3D to making a fully interactive 3d scene with 3d objects, lights, shaders, textures, are more.

Who this course is for:

The skill level required is a basic knowledge of ActionScript 3. The class will start from scratch to build projects so attendees can learn as the class progresses. Plenty of time will be spent learning about code. The instructor provides about 50 working examples to tinker with and ask questions about. This allows any skill level to get familiar with the concepts and then adapt the code.

More info & registration at: http://www.richmediainstitute.com/papervision3D_NYC_09

Twitter Power Tips - Free live webcast from O'Reilly Media

Date: Thursday, May 21st at 10 am PT 
Price: Free
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes
To register: oreilly.com/go/twitterpower

Details & Sign Up Here

Upcoming Meetings & Events

• May Meeting: Flex Sesson Part II presented by Mark Piller, founder and Chief Architect of Midnight Coders
  

We'll be giving away some fantastic prizes at this meeting:

1) One lucky winner will receive a copy of CS4 from CPAUG. For CPAUG members only. Must be present to win and have not won software in the past 12 months.

2) Join the meeting to enter AppPuncher giveaway from Midnight Coders. Two users will win a free license of the product.RIA AppPuncher™ is a software testing and debugging product. AppPuncher was designed from the ground up to facilitate testing of the Rich Internet Applications. 

• June 4 - Special Flex and Flash Catalyst Pre-Release Event!
  
• June 24 - WITF Media Center Tour
  

The Ultimate Guide to .htaccess Files

Sooner or later you'll need to make changes to your website's .htaccess file, and when you do, you'll want this comprehensive guide:  http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/the-ultimate-guide-to-htaccess-files/

Why I love the local User Group

I can't resist sharing this... 

"I was doubtful that the Adobe users in our area would be able to offer advanced presentations that are really going to advance my skill set, and, in 6 years of contracting, I'd never once needed to hire a subcontractor.

Within two weeks, though, my motivations took a decidedly selfish turn.  A long time contracting client needed some PHP work done, and I didn't have time to do it.   I thought back to that first meeting and the new members, mostly students from local community colleges, that had introduced themselves.  One of the students stood out in my mind, because he said that, in addition to going to school, he also had a job coding php. So, within hours of determining the requirement for a php developer, I had one on the job. He did a nice job at a reasonable rate.

My intention to give presentations to help the group members learn in general became subtly changed.  I realized that, by giving the right presentations, I could shape a pool of available labor that knew the things I needed them to know, and I could identify the members who seemed to understand the material the best. I could then use these minions to take over the world.  Did I say that out loud?"

More at: http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/why-i-love-the-local-user-grou.html

How E-mail Became a Direct-Marketing Rock Star in Recession

It's likely the least sexy tool in your marketing arsenal, but it could be the one that delivers real results.

E-mail has emerged as a recession darling, as retailers look to proven programs that are cost-effective and results-oriented. That's led to increasing investment in technologies that better target customers and serve up more enticing messages.

more...

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136516

Faking Flash/Flex on the iPhone

If you absolutely must have Flash on your iPhone, Tim Consolazio recommends trying an advanced version of VNC.

First, some background: VNC is a console/screen sharing system that lets you log into and use other machines over the Internet. You can basically share your screen with others along with your mouse and keyboard. You can try out VNC solutions for the iPhone right now and these currently let you connect to your remote PC or Mac and use it just as if you were sitting in front of the keyboard. This would also let you, theoretically, run Flash on your iPhone or Touch, albeit inside a browser.

MORE...
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/05/15/faking-flashflex-on-the-iphone-it-can-be-done-we-have-the-technology/

Should Your Branded Apps Be Toys or Tools?

Branded apps are hot right now. Clients want them because they are cool and agencies want to build them because they want to be cool. And as one of the folks here at Zehnder who sits in a lot of digital ideation discussions, both internally and with clients, I find one of the first big debates is always the question of "Should we be building something fun or useful?"

Full article at http://adage.com/smallagency/post?article_id=136646

New York Times AIR reader released

http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/new-york-times-air-reader-rele.html

Fixing Blemishes in Lightroom

Here's a very nice Lightroom tutorial from Digital Photography School.

What is Adobe® Flash® Catalyst?

Maybe you've heard it of or maybe you haven't but if you're a designer you'll want to know all about it!  

"Adobe® Flash® Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. These can range from interactive Ads, product guides and design portfolios to user interfaces for applications. Flash Catalyst enables designers to start from static compositions created in Adobe Photoshop® CS4, Illustrator® CS4, or Adobe Fireworks® CS4 and convert the artwork into applications and interactive content. The designer does this by visually defining events, transitions and motion. Flash Catalyst can output a finished Flash SWF or AIR application that’s ready to publish on the web. In addition designers can provide the project file to developers who can use Adobe Flex® Builder™ to add additional functionality such as connection to back-end systems."

More info at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

Getting started with Flash Catalyst article from Adobe Labs.

CPAUG is now optimized for your mobile phone

If you are as addicted to your iPhone (or other phone of choice) as I am, then you'll be happy to know that CPAUG has gone mobile friendly! Just bookmark this site on your phone and get the latest info and updates in a snap!

http://cenpennaug.mofuse.mobi

UPDATE 5-8-09:
Now the URL is even easier to remember:
http://cenpennaug.com/m/

May Meeting: Flex Sesson Part II presented by Mark Piller, founder and Chief Architect of Midnight Coders

Title:

May Meeting: Flex Sesson Part II presented by Mark Piller, founder and Chief Architect of Midnight Coders

Date and Time:

May 28, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address:

471 Jplwick Dr, Harrisburg, PA 17111

google map

Speakers:

Mark Piller is the founder and Chief Architect of Midnight Coders, an innovative and forward-thinking company specializing in products for RIA development, testing, integration and analytics. Mark has over 15 years of software development experience. For the past six years he has been specializing in building software infrastructure products designed to integrate Flex, Flash, and AJAX applications with a variety of backend systems, including .NET, Java, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Mark is very passionate about ease-of-use of software and prides himself in creating technologies that clearly demonstrate that quality. 

Past presenting experience: 

Adobe MAX 2007 

Adobe AIR Bus Tour 

WebManiacs 2007 

Dallas Flex User group 

Denver Flex User group 

Silicon Valley Flex User group 

Seattle Flex User Group 

New York Flex User Group 

Dallas TechFlex 2008 

Agenda:

Flex Sesson - Part II

Live, In-Person Event 

- Generating PDF documents from Flex clients 

- Tracking user behavior and analytics for Flex applications 

This two part session will provide an overview of various techniques and approaches developers can use in day-to-day activities for Flex and Flash application development, testing and runtime optimization. You will learn about ActionScript code generator for remoting and data management use-cases, learn how to create real-time messaging applications, see a demo of remoting invocation debugger and AMF traffic visualizer. Finally, you will see a demonstration of user behavior tracking and analytics in a Flex application. The session provides a lot of coding samples and API reviews. It is targeted at  a wide range of developers  ranging from beginner level to very advanced. Parts of the presentation will be useful for management folks and they are welcome to attend as well.

Link:

www.themidnightcoders.com

Keywords:

www.themidnightcoders.com

Flash

Flex

CPAUG

CPFUG

Mark Piller