This week has been very exciting for Adobe and those of us who use their products!  In case you haven't heard, Adobe released the beta of the new Flex IDE, now known as Flash Builder 4.  You can download the beta at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/.  Adobe has also released the beta of Flash Catalyst which you can download at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/.  In the upcoming months, we will be having some demos and classes on these 2 new Adobe products, so stay tuned!

I don't know if there are many of you who are interested in virtual reality/augmented reality/3D type topics but I discovered AR yesterday and have already started playing around with it.  I've placed a couple posts on my blog at www.flexadmiral.com including a link to the GE Smart Grid demo using AR.

Amazing.

Hi everyone,

I would like to offer a sincere apology for the mixup yesterday.  I know that you all took time to come to the meeting and participate with the group and I feel terrible for having to cancel... especially with everyone sitting out front of the building.

We were discussing rescheduling the meeting for two weeks, but that is Memorial Weekend and many are planning to be out of town (incl me).  So we will pick up again in June.

Again, I know this was very bad form and we apologize.

Shawn

Sorry for the late notice -- our May meeting has been canceled.

We wanted to thank those that were able to attend the April meeting.  This onth's meeting was informal and was an open topic discussion.  We spent part of the meeting brainstorming for ideas for the remainder of 2009.  An idea was also discussed regarding the possibility of a "Flex Boot Camp."  Presently, our membership would only allow for a partial-day event so we discussed extending an invitation to surrounding groups to see if there was interest by their mebers to also participate.  I will be sending out an email to inquire as to whether other Adobe groups in the Carolinas would be interested in participating.

The remainder of the meeting was spent discussing OOP with one of our new members and demonstrations of design patterns and OOP play a part in creating reusable and robust software.

We would like to encourage everyone to start using the group site for questions and triumphs.  If you build something, feel free to post it here.  Since the Adobe groups url is rather difficult to remember without a bookmark, I have redirected the www.triadfug.org url to our new groups site. 

We would really like to take advantage of some of the benefits of being an Adobe User Group and would like to encourage everyone to help us increase our ranks.  The more members we have, the more we will all benefit.  To help encourage everyone to inspire new members, we are going to be holding a group raffle from July to December 2009.  Here's how it's going to work.  For each meeting July - Dec 2009 that you attend, you will receive one point.  For each new member that attends at least 2 meetings from July to December 2009, you will receive two additional points (No partial points will be awarded).  The new members will also be receiving points for each meeting they attend and each new member they inspire to join.  At the December meeting, we will total all of the points together and the winner will receive the Adobe software suite of their choice (excluding the Master Collection), the price of which may not exceed US $ 2,100.

Please note: We can not award enterprise software such as ColdFusion Enterprise or Flash Media Server, nor can we give upgrade versions of software as prize options.

We have not yet chosen a topic for the May meeting so if there are any ideas, please post them on the forum.  We would also like to encourage everyone to post their questions, comments, and examples on the forum.  By utilizing the forum, and remainder of the group site, we can all benefit.  Also, if you hear of any employment opportunities, please post them in the jobs section.  If anyone has difficulty posting please let me know and I will be happy to post the job for you.  We are a community and as such want to help everyone stay employed.  The only restriction for the job board is that it be something relevant to the software and/or web field.  There are quite a few Flex users that still use .Net, Java, CF, etc so posting those positions is highly encouraged. 

Ok, thats about it for April.  See you all in May.

Cheers,

Shawn

Dan and I were talking today and he mentioned that one of the reasons he doesn't spend ore time on our group site is due to the url being so difficult to remember.  I can completely relate and if it weren't for bookmarks, I probably wouldn't spend as much time here either.  So today I set up a redirect from our old website url to the Adobe groups url.  From now on, if you want to get here, just type www.triadfug.org and you'll be here with us.

Cheers.

Hi all,

We would like to place an open call for anyone interested in making a presentation at one of the group meetings.  Regardless of the level of the presentation, we would welcome any help in getting together presentations.  Flex has a number of topics and we have yet to meet anyone that has mastered them all.  Whether its data access, creating custom components, using the drawing API, or whether its just a "Look What I'm Doing With Flex" presentation, we would love to see it.

Not every presentation need be a formal teaching experience.  Instead, we would like for members to bring code, questions, etc that we can examine and discuss ways of approaching the problems you find in your daily experience.

If you might be interested, please post in the forum, on the blog, or contact either myself or Dan and let us know.  We would like to encourage everyone to participate whether you are just starting or whether you have created enterprise applications.  We want to see them all.

See you all in April.  Cheers

Adobe is offering a special benefit to members of TFUG from now through May 31, 2009. To get the details of this special discount, members should contact Shawn by Shawn@triadfug.org and you’ll receive a copy of the details.

Adobe is offering a special benefit to members of TFUG from now through May 31, 2009. To get the details of this special discount, members should contact Shawn at shawn@triadfug.org and you’ll receive a copy of the details.

Adobe is delighted to offer Triad Flex User Group members special pricing on Adobe software. Place your order before March 2, 2009, in order to save 20% on all Adobe products in the North America online Adobe Store.

Here are the simple steps required to get your discount:
1) Visit http://www.adobe.com/go/cspartners <http://www.adobe.com/go/cspartners> and fill out the form. You must enter the Association Name AUG and the Member Number 72360 when filling out the form.
2) A custom Adobe Store URL with an embedded coupon code will be e-mailed to you.
3) The custom URL can be used only one time, and only by the requester. Additional program terms and conditions are detailed at the URL referenced above.

If you have additional questions or would prefer to place your order by phone, contact Adobe at 800-585-0774.

I wanted to thank everyone who attended the December 2008 meeting of the Triad Flex User Group.  It was great to see everyone again and to meet our new members.  Enclosed are the project files from today's presentation.  Looking forward to seeing you all next month.

Announcing the $100,000 Ribbit Killer App Challenge!

We're challenging you to help build the next generation phone company — by creating the ultimate Killer Voice Ware Application.

Ribbit was created with the understanding that the next generation of great communication solutions would be created, not by us, and not by a traditional phone company, but by you — the Flash and Flex Developers.

Using the Ribbit Open Telephony Platform, voice is now a programmable feature that is free from the traditional device — giving you direct access to the world's first global, programmable phone company. Ribbit is partnering with competitive software development community TopCoder to offer the Killer App Challenge — a chance for developers to create the next Killer Applications in five categories:

— Media, Advertising and Entertainment
— Social Networking and Communication
— Business and Productivity
— Carrier, Network, or ISP Integration
— Wildcard

The competition begins immediately and will conclude in March 2009.

Prizes The winner in each of the 5 categories will receive US $15,000 and will be eligible for the US $30,000 Grand Prize. Along the way, we’ll have three early submission Checkpoints, where we’ll award cash prizes to the best early submitters, and provide direct feedback from our judging panel including Adobe’s Flash, Flex and AIR Evangelists — so you can keep working to improve on your app and better your chances of winning.

Everybody Wins!

These are your inventions, your applications. We don't own them, you do. Even if you are not selected as an official contest winner, you're free to bring your solutions to your customers or marketplace and directly profit from your creativity.

Full contest details can be found at http://www.ribbit.com/killerappchallenge.

We can’t wait to see what develops!

I started thinking a few days ago about tag clouds that are commonly found on web pages and realized that, given the limited nature of screen real estate, eventually standard tag clouds will become concatenated.  The only other options to dropping tags with smaller entries is to continually decrease your font size (not practical, nor disability compliant), increase your screen real estate, or start thinking in more than one dimension.

I opted to do the latter.  So I began the creation of my 3D tag cloud project.  The project is really just a rough draft, but demonstrates the usefulness of having an unlimited area of expansion from which to interact with your tags.  In this example, I just pull my data from an embedded XML document, but the concept would work the same whether you called a web service, or an external source for your tags.

One of the major issues when displaying text in 3D comes from the fact that most 3D engines are bitmap based, which makes the rendering of text difficult, and maintaining good quality text is nearly impossible.  Instead, I opted to use the vectorvision library from Barcinski and JeanJean.  Vectorvision allows you to convert any text string into a vector based text object.  Once I created my text object, I simply add it into my Papervision 3D Flex project onto the surface of a pivot DisplayObject3D at random using the standard formula for spherical coordinates.

Here is the source code for the project so far, and there are a couple issues that have not been addressed, mainly the inversion of the vectorvision text objects as the pivot rotates, and adding click events to the tags.  I want to thank Seb Lee-Delisle and his article on particle billboarding which helped so much in development of this rotating tag cloud (rotag).