FlashMN

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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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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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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Tonight at FlashMN, Mark Gason led a very informative beginner’s session about TweenMax (and TweenLite).

Mark prefers TweenMax over TweenLite, because TweenMax contains TimelineMax.

Basically, TweenMax is like Tweener, except that the former has some extra features added.

There was so much more in the presentation, but you’ll have to ask the Yahoo! Group for more details. I need to roll out.

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Wednesday, January 20th, Mark Gason is presenting to the group TweenLite.

• The advantages of using a 3rd party tweening engine.
• The basics of installing and using TweenLite and TimelineLite.
• Getting started using them, code demonstration.
• Some advanced uses you may not think of.

As usual we meet at 6:30pm at Easel training in St. Paul.

All are welcome, but if you could, please RSVP at the Yahoo user group.
The RVSP poll should be up about a week before the event.

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Tonight we are making bobbleheads!!! In case you want to dive right into the code, here are some source files for you to import and use for your bobbleheads and bodies:

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September 16th, Dustin Tauer will be presenting Flash Catalyst.

For those that don’t know Dustin, he is the VP of Training & Development at Easel Training. Combine his amazing presentation abilities with some hot new software, and we have an exciting event coming up.

The presentation starts at 7:00PM at 23 Empire Drive, and pizza / socialization starts at 6:30PM.

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I am sitting in tonight’s FlashMN meeting and am quite impressed with the stuff Dan Holth is doing with 3D in Flash. He (and his team) are working on a sweet 3D application that allows you to test out all sorts of floor tiling (literally floor tiles that you would lay down on the floor of your kitchen or bathroom) types, patterns, and colors.

He is using the “custom perspective projection point” to manage the perspective of his 3D items. There is an object called “perspectivePoint” that allows you to control the perspective.

The “perspectivePoint” object utilizes Flash Player 10, so some folks (I’m looking at you, Grandma!) won’t be able to view the feature.

Masks, by default, follow the 3D perspective - this is bad. Dan had to do some “special” stuff to make the mask work properly.

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