FlashMN

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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At tonight’s meeting, Twin Cities Flash guru, Dustin Tauer, showed us all sorts of neat Flash animation tricks. Dustin has an engaging presentation style, and it

Dustin started out by sharing an update about the “iPhone OS” export in Flash. Apple recently re-authorized the use of the exporter. This is pretty cool.

TWEENING

- In the old days, we would create an object on the stage, create a keyframe, then add a tween to it.

- Now there are no keyframes. We simply add a motion tween.

- You can copy-and-paste motions.

- In the old days if you wanted to move a tweened object, you would need to move all of the keyframed objects on the stage.

- Now you can select an entire animation and move it left or right or up or down on the stage.

- Now you can also easily add guides to tweens. You can edit the tweens using the “Free Transform” tool. This is really fast.

- You can now replace objects/shapes using copy-and-paste without switching objects in keyframes.

- You can copy-and-paste to different layers easily now.

- Now you can easily add more frames to a tween by dragging the last keyframe in the timeline. FYI: Holding “Shift” and dragging the last keyframe on the timeline adds frames after the last keyframe. Otherwise, it will scale the entire tweened animation.

- If you want to move/drag a keyframe using the new tween stuff, hold “Cntrl” and select/drag the keyframe.

- Now if you want to change a property on an object during a tween, you have to change the property at the beginning and end of the tween.

- If you want to view and clear only certain keyframes (i.e. properties). Right-click on the timeline and mouseover “View Keyframes” or “Clear Keyframe”

- To clear a single keyframe on the timeline, “Cntrl”-click the keyframe, then right-click on the keyframe and select “Clear Keyframe” (or press F6)

INVERSE KINEMATICS (”The Bone Tool”)
1) Create a shape
2) Select the bone tool and create joints on the shape
3) Drag the keyframe to the right and create a keyframe in the middle of the timeline with an animation
4) SPRINGS!!! - Click on the “Armature” layer’s properties, and select the “Enable” checkbox under “Spring”
5) Click on a bone, and on that bone’s Properties, change it’s strength and dampening to a number (between 1 - 100).
6) Make sure there are a bunch of extra frames on the end of the timeline animation to accommodate spring. WOW!!!

FYI: Bones each have an instance name.
FYI2: “Spring” is a CS5-only thing.

trace (World);
trace (Joint);

var w:World = new World(null, null);

ANIMATING TEXT
- You can either use “Ease” in the Properties panel or
- FYI: By default, easing is tween-wide. To fix this, we need to use the “Motion Editor”, which is located in a panel next to the timeline by default.
- FYI: The Motion Editor only displays the frames for the current tween.
- To apply multiple tweens to an object, you need to select a single frame (using CNTRL-click), then right-click the selected keyframe and select “Split Motion”. This creates a separate tween on the timeline that you can edit.

MOTION PATH
- The only anchor points you get with a tween are the keyframes that you create. So, to create pivot/anchor points, either manually add keyframes or select in the timeline and drag the object.
- Once anchor points are created, you can use the anchor tools to edit the path (but only at keyframes/anchor points).

CHARACTER ANIMATION

- Why Graphic Symbol rather than Movie Clip? Answer: Because we can tell which frame to show within the graphic symbol (under the Properties panel so long as “Single Frame” is selected)
- A Graphic Symbol will play through its frames ONLY if the timeline that it is inside of/on is moving across the timeline. OR you can tell it to stay on a single frame in the Properties panel.

CLASS FILES

- Use external “Class” files to save time (i.e. you don’t need to rewrite code). They have the “.as” extension.

- Use Linkage to attach classes to objects

- If you need to attach the same class to two objects, add the class in the “Class” field via Linkage for the first object. For the second class, add the class name in the “Base Class” text field.

package {
import flash.display.MovieClip;
public class Test extends MoviClip {
public function Test() {
//constructor code
// This code gets called only once when it is first attached to an object.
}
}
}

-

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The FlashMN meeting this month will be on the 15th at 6:30-9:00 in the Easel Training building.
23 Empire Drive, St. Paul, MN

There will be food, dance, and invaluable Flash-related knowledge all for free! So don’t miss it.

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The third Wednesday of the month, July 20th, will be a code jam using Context Free Art.

For those of you who attended FlashBelt, we saw a number of amazing things, but if you’re like me, not the time in the world to try them.

Let’s take a couple hours and see what we can make!
Context Free Art is a program (Mac & Windows) that allows you to easily create recursive, fractal, and simple geometric art with very little code.

Here’s the url if you’d like to have a peak before the meeting. (And get it installed)
http://www.contextfreeart.org/

As usual, we begin at 6:30 for pizza and socializing, then start in around 7:00 until 9:00.
The location will be at Easel Training at 23 Emprire Drive, St. Paul, MN

For this session, bring a laptop if you have one, if you don’t, no problem.

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