FlashMN

Our October meeting will be this Wednesday (10/17) and the topic is “Adobe Lightroom”. The presenter this month will be one of the members of Adobe’s Lightroom team so we’ll be getting a demonstration from a true expert!

Whether you take pictures with your cell phone, point-and-shoot, or a fancy DSLR, Adobe Lightroom is a piece of software you should have. It has a complete set of digital photography tools and helps photographers of any skill level import, organize, edit, and archive their digital photos. Adobe essentially took all the useful photography features of Photoshop and bundled them into an easy-to-use but incredibly robust tool. Lightroom is included in the Adobe Creative Cloud and can also be purchased individually. It’s seriously one of the coolest tools Adobe makes and is definitely worth checking out.

Time and location for the meeting are below. For more information about Lightroom, check out the product page on Adobe’s website (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.edu.html). Hope to see you there!

Adobe Lightroom at FlashMN
When: Wednesday, October 17th
Time: Social/Pizza/Pop: 6:30pm, Presentation: 7:00-8:30
Where: Easel Solutions (23 Empire Drive, Saint Paul, MN 55103)

RSVP HERE

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Get up to 40% off all Adobe professional video editing tools when you switch from Final Cut Pro or Avid to Adobe Creative Cloud™ or CS6 Production Premium (volume customers only). Use Production Premium promo code: SWITCH. Creative Cloud discount applied automatically. See details

Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS6 includes more than 50 new features designed to make the transition easier than ever, including common commands, panels, and keyboard shortcuts. Tight integration with After Effects® and Photoshop® software and unmatched performance make the experience even better. Hurry, offer ends November 30, 2012.

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Our next meeting is going to continue our tour around Creative Suite 6. We’re going to take a look at After Effects. We also have a special guest speaker: Scott Cornell.

Adobe After Effects has been an industry-leading tool for creating amazing visual effects and motion graphics. In this presentation, Scott Cornell will be giving us an overview on how to get started using After Effects. He’ll also be diving into some of the great new features of After Effects CS6. Scott (http://scottacornell.com) is a freelance motion graphics designer and 3D artist and brings years of experience to the table. This presentation will have a little something for everyone. If you’re a new user, you’ll get a great overview of this powerful too and see how to get started. If you’ve been working in motion graphics (either with After Effects or another tool), this will be a good opportunity to see some of the latest techniques and get your questions answered from an industry expert.

We’ll also discuss some Creative Cloud discounts available to anyone to currently uses competitive video editing software like Final Cut Pro or Avid. Oh, and of course, there will be some swag to give away.

Next Meeting: Wednesday, September 19th
Where: Easel Solutions :: 23 Empire Drive, Saint Paul, 55103
When: Doors open at 6:15 :: Free pizza and pop at 6:30 :: Presentation 7:00-8:45
RSVP: https://adobeformscentral.com/?f=7AA6GoWg%2A0oklvm9LBcdDw

Remember that each meeting you attend gives you a “name in the hat” for our end of the year drawing where you can win up to $2000 in your choice of Adobe software. See you tonight!!

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Check out tv.adobe.com for all sorts of “how-to” videos on CS 5.5

Check out the Easel Training Blog for additional resources.

Pricing: Upgrades from CS5 are in the $300 - $549 range. Upgrades from CS4 are a bit more.

InDesign

Dustin did a great overview of the new InDesign features. The highlight is the new Adobe cloud publishing feature, which will get your e-books into the hands of mobile device owners.

Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver CS 5.5’s neatest new feature is “MultiScreen”. Dreamweaver will help you develop for different sizes of browsers (a.k.a. iPhone users, iPad users).

Another sweet featured of Dreamweaver CS 5.5 is the inclusion of jQuery Mobile templates. These basically give you a great head start to building your own html-based web app.

PhoneGap is also included in Dreamweaver CS 5.5, so you can actually test and export mobile apps for Android and iPhone.

Flash

You can easily choose to build AIR for Android or AIR for iOS.
You can use the accelerometer in mobile devices.
Check out market.android.com to get your app into the Android marketplace.

Watch Lee Brimelow build and deploy an Android app in about 6 minutes.

Publishing to iOS
Note: In CS 5.5 you can share assets between .fla projects. To take advantage of this feature, use the “Project” panel and create a new project. Once you have the new project created, you can check the select box in the “Library” panel next to the asset you want to share.

You can now scale entire projects on the fly.

Note: When previewing mobile apps, the size of the stage will be dynamically resized to match the device being tested.
Note: If you want to test out iOS apps on the actual devices, you need to sign up and pay at developer.apple.com their $99/year fee and also jump through a bunch of other hoops to get things to the testing phase.

As Dustin says, if you want to publish on iOS, “You’ve got to want it.” It is pretty difficult to get things set up with Apple + Flash (though the problem here is on Apple’s side of things as evidenced by the ease by which we can publish Android apps in 6 minutes).

For more resources on how to get rolling with iOS development in Flash, check out Dustin’s blog post on the matter.

Toby Cryns is manager of FlashMN, is a Flash enthusiast, and is a WordPress developer in Minneapolis, MN. He runs The Mighty Mo! Design Co., a WordPress design and development shop in Minneapolis.

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We have an exciting presentation lined up this month. Adam Papierniak will be
presenting on Arduino.

Arduino and beer.
A brief overview of the Arduino, what (and who) it’s good for, the language used
to program it and maybe a couple super simple light-flashing demo’s.
Then onto the fun stuff, looking at the tap-mounted Arduino and how it’s talking
to the web. Of course we’ll have to pour some beer to see how it works! I’ll
also explain my plans for the kegerator setup. Should pretty light and not too
terribly technical.

Easel Training
23 Empire Drive, St. Paul MN
6:30-7:00 - social / free pizza
7:00~8:00 - presentation

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Wallaby is a piece of software available for download from Adobe Labs that will convert Flash timeline-based animations to HTML5.

Tonight, Dustin Tauer demoed Wallaby, and…Wow! It is pretty darn cool. It does the following:

- Works with the bone tool
- Works with timeline-based animations

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GIS uses layers of data

Metro GIS
Data Finder

GIS uses vector data (colors or street maps) as well as raster data (arial or satellite photography).

A lot of GIS data can be had. It is sometimes at a scale of 1 pixel=1 square meter.

When thinking about GIS data in terms of Facebook and Foursquare, it is easy to see how those companies have some serious data to sell.

For example, you can now tell when and where teenagers are travelling after school. You can roughly determine the routes that shoppers take to the downtown Target store. You can tell how far people are willing to travel to go to the movies or to a popular restaurant.

If I was downtown Target, I could utilize that data to think about where my parking garage entrance should be.

If I was Chino Latino in Uptown, I could see where my customers are hanging out before they come into the restaurant. I could also see where they go when they leave. Maybe I want to have a coupon for folks that are coming from a certain popular destination.

This stuff is really cool!

arcGIS: The biggest mapping application company

Open Street Maps: A publicly-owned version of Google Maps’ data set. Uses crowd-sourcing.

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Mobile apps: It’s easier than web development

Time: 6:30 Social, Presentation: 7:00-8:00, Workshop: 8:00-9:00
Presenters: Nick Bilyk and Judah (dorkiedork) Frangipane

No mobile device required! This presentation will be to show how to make mobile apps, how to get started quickly and wipe away any fear or hesitation about developing for mobile.
Designers and developers welcome.

Requirements:
Not a must, but if you could bring a laptop and install the latest Flash Builder Burrito, it would be awesome.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder_burrito/

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Squinkies!

At tonight’s FlashMN meeting, Ryan Coatney from Blip Toys shared his key learnings from his development of the Squinkies website.

In case you don’t know, Squinkies are a series of kids toys that are one of the hottest-selling toys in the world.

The website is key to the Squinkies strategy, because it helps kids to keep track of which Squinkies they have and which ones they want.

The development team gets a lot of great feedback from their Facebook page. Parents will log in and provide advice and ideas. For example, the idea of a printable “Squinkie bank” came directly from Facebook.

Also, I learned tonight that Blackberry will be giving away a free Playbook tablet to everyone who gets an app accepted to their proprietary app store prior to the launch of the tablet. (Thanks Dustin!)

The cool thing about this is that the Blackberry app store accepts Adobe Air apps.  That means that if you can create something in Flash, you can create a Blackberry app.  I am sure that last sentence is an oversimplification, but you get the idea here.  Score one for Flash!

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Tonight, our own former leader, Saviz Artang, demoed his new online email system, Babblepals. It is an email application designed for very young people. (see description below)

Don’t miss the next Flashmn event on Oct 20th where Saviz Artang will be sharing
his experience and challenges in the making of Babblepals.com.

Technology used in Babblepals is: Flash, Flex, C#/Linq SQLServer back end.
We’ll discuss these technologies and how they are used as well as asset and
sound management and game development since the application also includes a 2D
shooting game to help with reading.

URL:
http://babblepals.com

What is it? Babblepals.com is a safe free place for children as young as 3 or 4
to be able to send and receive emails to their friends and family through
Babblepals.com. The child does not have to be able to read or write to send or
receive an email. The words sound out and you can drag and drop. So make sure
your speakers are turned on. Parents can decide who the child can send to or
receive from and they can monitor all incoming and outgoing messages and approve
them before they are received or seen by the child.

You can register and setup your family and friends (with cute avatars - thanks
for Yui) and click on the button to send an email and it walks you through what
you need to do.

There is also a balloon word game in the site that kids can play to practice
word recognition. It has 45 levels so they can continue to play the different
levels to get better at reading.

Creators: Saviz Artang, Jeff Worner and Yui Tanabe

Saviz tied a number of technologies together to get text-to-speech functionality working with Flex and saved as mp3s. Amazing stuff, Saviz!

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