Flash in the Peg

If you’re working in or interested in Adobe AIR, there’s a free e-book available that you might find helpful: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide. You can read the book on-line, or download a pdf version.

Our next meeting is set for Thursday, August 9, and is going to be all about ColdFusion 8! The meeting will feature a presentation recorded by Ben Forta, Adobe’s Senior Technical Evangelist. Whether you’re new to ColdFusion or have already tried out the public betas on Adobe Labs, I think you’ll find this an interesting meeting!

The meeting will be held on Thursday, August 9 at 7:00 p.m. in our usual room W411 of Red River College, Princess Street campus.

More info to come, so stay tuned!

If you’re planning to attend MAX in Chicago this year, the deadline for early bird registration is July 23rd. If you register before then, you can save up to $400 off the registration price. There is also an early bird discount for the pre-event training sessions.

Here are the prices (in USD) and deadlines for conference registration:

• $1,095 Early Bird discount, must be purchased on or before July 23, 2007
• $1,295 Regular pricing if purchased July 24 - September 21, 2007
• $1,495 If purchased onsite September 22 - October 3, 2007

One- or two-day passes are also available.

Also, if your company is thinking of sending more than one person to MAX, Adobe is offering a 3-for-2 group discount.

More info can be found at the MAX 2007 website.

This year’s FITC Winnipeg Roadshow will be a two-day event, to be held on November 16 and 17. On the 16th there will be pre-event workshops, while on the 17th there will be two tracks of presentations (similar to last year’s Roadshow), followed by an evening mixer. You can find more information at the FITC Winnipeg Roadshow site. They’ve recently added a couple more speakers for the 17th, and will be announcing more as we get closer to the event, so keep checking that site for more details.

FITC has been kind enough to offer a 10% discount to members of Flash in the Peg! Use the code ‘Flashinthepeg775′ when you order your tickets via their on-line store. The discount applies only to the festival ticket for the 17th - the presentations and the mixer - not to the workshops.

And don’t forget that we’ll be raffling off a free admission to the FITC Winnipeg Roadshow at every Flash in the Peg meeting from now until November!

I’ll pass on more info as I get it, but if you have any questions about the event, please let me know.

Hope you’re all having a great summer! My apologies for the long period of
radio silence, but the last month or so has been kind of hectic around
these parts, to say the least.

Now that things are settling down, I just wanted to drop a quick note to
update you all on a few things:

1. Topics for upcoming meetings. I thought I’d give you an idea of what
   some of the next meetings will look at:
   • Introduction to Ajax. What’s Ajax and what can it do for you? We’ll look
     at the basic concepts behind Ajax, then take a look at Adobe’s Spry
     framework for Ajax, and how that’s been integrated into Dreamweaver CS3.
   • Prototyping in Fireworks. Fireworks CS3 has some nifty new features that
     make developing web site prototypes much, much easier. We’ll walk through
     how Photoshop and Fireworks work together at the mockup stage, and how
     Fireworks can be used to develop wireframes and walkthroughs of a proposed
     web site.
   • Flash Lite primer. Flash Lite is a version of Flash optimized for mobile
     devices. I’ll show you what the current Flash Lite environment looks like
     and what’s involved in developing in Flash Lite.

   For other meeting topics, there has been some interest in a general Flash
   primer. I think this is a great idea, and would definitely love to put
   something together for a future meeting. But I’d like to target it at the
   broadest range of people, so if you’re interested in this topic, please
   email me privately and let me know what you’d like this meeting to cover.
   Are you brand new to Flash and would like to learn the basic principles?
   Have you got your feet wet and would like to start moving toward the
   deeper end of the pool?
   Any other ideas? What would you like to learn about/discuss?

2. Our next meeting. A couple people have expressed a preference for a
   summer meeting hiatus, and a couple others have been curious about when
   our next meeting will be held. Given how short our summers can be, what
   are your thoughts on holding a meeting at some point in the next month or
   so?

   (As of about September, I plan to establish a regular, predictable
   schedule for meetings. If you have a preference for when that would be –
   earlier in the month? later? – let me know!)

3. Software raffle. Twice per year, Adobe provides software for the group
   to raffle off. The winner gets to choose the software package of their
   choice, valued at up to $2100 (USD - practically the same thing at $2100
   Cdn these days!). I’m working up the rules for how the raffle for the
   second half of this year will work, and will post them in the next week or
   so, but to give you some advance warning: one way of earning extra raffle
   ‘tickets’ will be if you make a presentation to the group. So if there’s
   something that you’d like to present, send me an email!
4. Discussion list/forum. I’m exploring alternatives for setting up a
   web-based forum. The flashinthepeg.org blog uses Wordpress, and they also
   make forum software. It looks pretty slick and integrates nicely with
   Wordpress, so at some point in the next week or so, I’ll try installing
   that, so people can give it a try and see if it’s something they’d like to
   use.
   If folks would rather have something email-based, I could create a
   separate email list to be used for general discussion, and reserve this
   list for announcements only. How do people feel about having to subscribe
   to multiple lists?

Adobe has released the public beta of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). You can download it from Adobe Labs.

Thanks to everybody who showed up for Thursday’s meeting! As promised, here are the files that were used in the demonstration:
Meeting #2 demo files.

These files were created to demonstrate how to implement SWFObject and sIFR in an HTML site.

I’ve included only the files that were necessary for the purposes of the demonstration. I highly recommend that you download the zip files for each script and take a look at them, since they have a wealth of extra information about how to make the most of the scripts.

I’ve also added fairly detailed comments to ‘home.html’ and to ‘navbar.fla’, to help explain what’s going on in each.

If you have any questions about anything in this package, email me.

Just a quick reminder that our next meeting is this Thursday, June 7, from 7:00 to 9:00 at Red River College, Princess Street campus, room W411. We’ll look at a couple of ways of integrating Flash into web sites in a standards- and search engine-friendly manner (more info here).

Room W411 is the same room as our last meeting; here’s a map showing how to get to the room:

Hope to see you out on Thursday!

Adobe has released a public beta of ColdFusion 8. You can get it at Adobe Labs.

Hi everybody, hope you’ve all had a great spring! My apologies for not being quicker in planning our second meeting, and for the rather short notice - we were on vacation for a while, and the time sort of slipped away.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, June 7, from 7:00 to 9:00 at Red River College, Princess Street campus (room TBA). We’ll take a look at a couple of really cool Javascript-based methods of integrating Flash content into web sites. These methods are standards-compliant, accessible, and search engine-friendly. And they’re very easy to use, so even if you don’t know any Javascript, you can use these methods to really enrich your sites with very little effort.

And, thanks to the good folks at FITC, we’ll be raffling off a free admission to this year’s FITC Winnipeg roadshow event to one lucky attendee!

The first bit of Javascript we’ll look at is Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject. One advantage of SWFObject over the standard method of embedding Flash content is that it lets you specify alternate content that is viewable to those who don’t have the Flash player installed. This content can also be crawled by search engines. By way of example, we’ll look at using SWFObject to add a Flash navigation bar to an HTML site.

The second method we’ll look at is sIFR. You know that you can use CSS to specify what fonts should be used to display HTML content, but ultimately you’re at the mercy of a relatively short list of common fonts. sIFR combines the power of Flash and Javascript to display small snippets of text (like headers and small quotes) in whatever font your design requires. We’ll look at how easy it is to get sIFR up and running.

If you can make it out, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know by email at darren@flashinthepeg.org. I hope to see you on June 7th!