Everyone,

It seems like every few months Dallas is awarded a special honor due
to our community and this week is one of those weeks that the
community will get together and share some amazing moments.

In case you haven't been watching any communications, this week is the
week of TexFlex. We have a slew of amazing presenters talking about
many different Flash related topics. This year's speakers are Danny
Dura, James Ward, Mike Wilcox, Jonathan Campos Matt Bugbee, Mike
Nimer, Jason Fincanon, Dimi Arhontidis, Carter Bradford, Nate Beck,
Joel Hooks, Mike Smith, Christopher Long, and a Keynote by James Ward
of Adobe.

Welcome to a new month and some new sugar induced headaches. I hope that Halloween and October ended with a blast as we are quickly marching towards Turkey Day!

This month is another exciting month in the life of D-Flex!

Presenting at D-Flex this month we have Dave Shuck talking about Test Driven Development in FlashBuilder 4!

Everyone,

This week is D-Flex! Come join the largest Flex community in the
nation and see what is currently going on.

Why is this month special? Because this month was MAX, Adobe's annual
worldwide conference displaying the newest technology coming out over
the next horizon. This month different community members that attended
will be showing off some of the coolest things that they learned this
last week. We meeting from 7pm-9pm with a happy hour following. We
also have training starting at 6pm.

Please make sure to RSVP at: http://d-flex.org or
http://groups.adobe.com/groups/7fc5b9c696/summary

In case you missed it, I posted the August Wrap Up with the August Meeting to keep the data together. The meeting post and wrap up with source files and recordings.

Everyone,

One last reminder that there is a D-Flex meeting tonight! We will be giving away a copy of CS4 along with training that starts at 6 pm.

We will be meeting in the School of Management at UTD rm. 1.502.

The meeting tonight starting at 7pm will be all about new Flex 4 features, specifically states and Spark Skinning presented by Jason Fincanon and myself!

Make sure to RSVP so we know how much food to buy and I will see you there!

Spread the word!

Jonathan

So, with our fearless leader Jonathan risking his life with the bulls in Spain, I decided to pull in some new speakers for our July D-Flex meeting. 

Dan Blackman, mudd brick inc, lead us through a deep discussion on Flex repeaters, covering why we should or shouldn't use them.  The discussion only followed a couple short tangents to topics like binding and LiveCycle Data Services.  ( we will make note of the interest in these topics and will cover them in an upcoming meeting).  I'll have to say that I think that this was the biggest group I've seen in the training portion of the meeting.  Anyway, thanks Dan, we enjoyed your training session!

Next up we had Bron Davis, The Pursuant Group, demonstrate several techniques in using the Flex framework to make an application work with other languages and locals.  Bron showed us how easy it was to use embedded and external resource files in international applications.  Not having worked in the area, many of us were surprised at how well Flex supported multiple languages.

Slides from presentation:

http://app.sliderocket.com/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=E9A2BD99-933D-AAF5-5AE6-81932E1D1F5E

The project files can be found here:

http://groups.adobe.com/posts/7b717f4ee6

John Gorena, Voyager Expanded Learning, followed up by discussing in depth why and how he created his custom particle engine in Flex. 

Here are links to the demos:
http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1143608/flexParticles/Particles.swf
http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1143608/flexParticles/FireDemo.swf
http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1143608/flexParticles/BlobDemo.swf

and the presentation:

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1143608/flexParticles/Particle%20System%20Presentation.pdf

Everyone,

Just a quick reminder that we are having our July D-Flex meeting this Thursday! 

Location:

The University of Texas at Dallas
School of Management, rm 1.502
800 W Campbell Rd, Richardson, TX
Parking is in LOT J and M

map

Speakers:

Bron Davies is the Senior Development Manager at The Pursuant Group in Plano, Tx.  He manages the development  of Unifyer.com, a Flex based organizational communications platform.

6pm Training by Dan Blackman. Dan is the founder of Mudd Brick, Inc, an Adobe software development and training company. He provides services as a Senior Web Consultant, Mentor, and Adobe Certified Instructor to small and large businesses alike.

Agenda:

In July's meeting, we will be discussing strategies to make a Flex application work with other languages and locales, displaying translatable text efficiently, and general issues around using external resources in the UI. 

In addition, John Gorena, of Voyager Expanded Learning, will be demonstrating his cool Flex based particle engine and our UG co-manager Derek Bumpas will be giving an introduction to Adobe's Flash Collaboration Service.

Food will be provided. Please RSVP, so we can plan to have enough food.

6-7 pm : Free 1 hour Of Flex Training

What to bring:

Your laptop with Flex Builder 3 installed

Targeted audience:

Beginner level, no prior knowledge of Flex is required

7-8 pm :  Localization with Flex

8-9 pm :  Flex Particle Engine and Flash Collaboration Service

As always, spread the word and let others know of D-Flex and please RSVP so we can get our food counts.   You can RSVP at our Groups.adobe.com or www.d-flex.org.

Derek

The project and slideshow from the localization presentation can be found here:

This last June was a crazy busy month with all of the technology events happening in Dallas. First we had D-Flex, the the Dallas Tech Fest, and finally the Adobe User Group tour. I think everyone is taking some time off for a bit after this fun and exciting month.

In D-Flex this month we had our 6pm hour focused on skinning and flex css. Here we showed off many different style properties, how to transfer these properties to a css file, and finally how to use these css files along with 9-slice scaling to make some truely unique application designs.

Everyone,

This is a quick message to remind everyone that tonight is the Adobe User Group Tour at Dave and Busters on 35.

We have software, shirts, and tech to give away along with some of the newest and coolest information on upcoming technologies within Adobe, specifically Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, and CF9.

Food will be provided starting at 530 and doors open at 5pm. The actually presentation starts at 630pm and we will be hanging around to socialize afterwards. If you haven't RSVP'ed yet feel free to do that now: http://tinyurl.com/daugfxcftour

- hint: Some of the coolest giveaways are only for RSVP'ers. -

I hope to see you all there tonight, the provided link has all the details if you need more. I highly recommend coming and feel free to invite bosses and other people you work with as this is a great time to learn and see all the best improvements coming out.

And make sure to get your friends to sign up at http://groups.adobe.com, we are 2 away from the largest group in the nation!

Jonathan

This month's D-Flex meeting was very interesting as I was jumping off a plane from 360Flex to present some of the subjects I learned at 360Flex along with our topic of Flex Libraries as we continue to work towards building our own application at D-Flex.

This last March meeting was one of the best yet! That's my opinion and I am sticking to it. I would like to know more about what others thought though.

In March we continued making changes to help everyone get on the same page in a very "hands on" way. The meeting started with our usual announcements and hour long training session by Mark Piller. The training session wrapped up basic Actionscript and Classes and went into Components and Layout.

We then recapped what Flex is for the large quantity of new members and then started our presentation for the evening.

Framework discussions are complete and we are now ready to move forward with the D-Flix application.

During the February meeting we had Chris, the creator of the Swiz framework, present via Connect a introductory lesson on the Swiz Framework. The following URL is the recording of that event:

D-Flex Swiz Presentation

Happy Birthday D-Flex! This January marks the one year anniversary of the first D-Flex meeting. Our outstanding group stays at around 35 - 40 members per meeting and we have over 200 Dallas and remote members, what an achievement to celebrate!

Barring a few technical difficulties this December D-Flex meeting was an excellent culmination of the first year of D-Flex. In this meeting we covered the PureMVC framework as we get closer to our group’s first application D-Flix, a Flex based Netflix application, along with meeting planning for our next year.