Flash in the Peg

At our last meeting, we looked at Flex and AIR. If you want to dive into the land of the Rich Internet Application, you’ll need to learn ActionScript 3. Even if the RIA isn’t for you, the latest versions of the Flash Player support ActionScript 3. AS3 introduces a number of improvements over AS2 - most notably a substantial increase in the speed of code execution - but it also has some major differences from what you’re used to with AS2.

To help get you started climbing that learning curve, tonight’s meeting will be an introduction to ActionScript 3, with particular attention to some of the differences between it and ActionScript 2. We’ll take a look at a lot of side-by-side code comparisons to see how some things compare between AS2 and AS3.

To top it all off, there are some great prizes lined up, including a number of books on Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3. Plus, everybody who attends will earn a ticket towards the raffle of Adobe software to be held at our June meeting! Remember, the software of your choice up to a value of $2100 US will be given away in June - the more tickets you’ve earned, the better your chance of winning. As if the great content at the meeting isn’t reason enough to attend!

Our meeting is scheduled for tonight, Thursday, April 4, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. We’ll meet at our usual location, room W411, Red River College, Princess Street Campus.

As you may have heard, Adobe has announced the release of Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0. Now that the cat is out of the bag, this will be the focus of tonight’s meeting! Adobe is sponsoring this meeting with food, giveaways and a raffle copy of Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus support for automated functional testing in Flex Builder 3.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, delivering rich Internet applications (RIA) on the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write RIAs on the desktop using the same skills that you’ve been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

We’ll watch a number of presentations to help bring you up to speed on what Flex and AIR are all about. I’ll demo some simple AIR apps to show you just what you can accomplish with AIR, and give a quick demonstration of how easy it is to create an AIR application from your legacy apps using the freely available AIR SDK. (Most of the meeting will be about AIR - we’ll take a closer look at Flex at a later meeting.)

In addition to the copy of Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional, we’ll also be raffling off some books and other great prizes you won’t want to miss. Plus, Adobe has sent some great AIR 1.0 t-shirts and posters.

If you haven’t already, let me know if you’ll be attending! We’re meeting at 7:00 tonight at Red River College, Princess Street campus, room W411.