OC Flex

Topic:

The value of play and experimentation for designers and developers.

About Sean:

Sean Voisen is a teacher, programmer, designer and occasional philosopher who hails from San Diego, California. He has been engaged in an intimate love affair with the Flash platform for the past 11 years, but has been known to cheat on occasion with other technologies like Processing and Ruby. As an independent developer, Sean has had the good fortune to work with companies like Adobe, PayPal, Userplane/AOL, and Hallmark on projects built in AIR, Flex, Flash and Ruby on Rails. As an instructor at the Art Institute of California-San Diego, he has worked to share his hard-earned knowledge with the next generation of Flash designers and developers, and has learned a few new things along the way.

Summary

Topic: Play, Experimentation and Design: Thoughts for Programmers
Speaker: Sean Voisen
Date: Thursday August 7th
Time: 7pm
Location: FarHeap Solutions offices at
2601 Main St Suite 1200
Irvine, CA 92614

Pizza and refreshments provided by FarHeap Solutions.

This month we'll raffle a ticket for 360|Flex conference in San Jose.

Topic:

Custom components, states, transitions, and more

Spend a relaxing evening with Judah as he shares a few secrets on component development, states and transitions, states and transitions in components, trigger effects and the skinning features in Flex Builder 3. He will also be giving away 3 commercial components to the people who bring the most friends.

About Judah :

Judah Frangipane is a software engineer writing mostly in Flex and Flash. He is especially keen on UI design. He's worked in asp, jsp, php, .net, c#, java, vb, javascript, actionscript, flash, mxml, xml over the past 10 years (translation, hes had no life -ed.). He’s worked on creating Flash components and Flex components and applications. In addition he has been consulting for the last 3 years and teaching in between. He also sells Flex and Flash components at Drumbeat Insight.

Summary

Topic: Custom components, states, and transitions
Speaker: Judah Frangipane
Date: Wednesday July 2nd
Time: 7pm
Location: FarHeap Solutions offices at
2601 Main St Suite 1200
Irvine, CA 92614

Pizza and refreshments provided by FarHeap Solutions.

This month we'll raffle a ticket for 360|Flex conference in San Jose.

Topic:

SCUGE: Open Source Game Framework.

Iman Khabazian will discuss SCUGE, an open source game framework. SCUGE is a best practice based architecture for creating games.

About Iman:

Iman Khabazian is the Managing Director for IMAN IT, a web 2.0 incubator. In this role he has served as the Technical Director for Beanie Babies 2.0 virtual world. Prior to this he has managed developers, architected enterprise software, and written over 50 flash games for companies such as AOL and Dairy Queen. He is also the founder of the object oriented design forum and maintains the "May the source be with you" blog.

Summary

Topic: SCUGE: Open Source Game Framework
Speaker: Iman Khabazian
Date: June 5th
Time: 7pm
Location: FarHeap Solutions offices at
2601 Main St Suite 1200
Irvine, CA 92614

Pizza and refreshments provided by FarHeap Solutions.

We will have a big raffle this time, so come for a chance to win one piece of Adobe software of up to $2100 in value! You will also need to fill this survey to be included in the raffle, and be present to win. Please fill the survey before coming to the meeting, to make things quicker.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, April 9th. We will have Robert Cadena presenting about BlazeDS. Please note that this meeting is not scheduled in the normal "first Thursday of the month" to accomodate for the speaker's availability.

[Read more →]

Mansour Raad, the Senior Software Architect of ArcWebServices at ESRI, will speak at our next OC Flex meeting. This meeting is scheduled one week before our usual meeting date, but it will be a great presentation. In the words of Ben Forta, “[Mansour] is one of the most engaging and passionate presenters I have ever met.”

[Read more →]

We skipped last months meeting, but we think this months will make up for it. On February 7th Doug McCune is coming to town to speak about “Using Flex Open Source Projects.” Doug is a huge advocate of open source libraries and he's always showcasing the possibilities of what you can achieve in Flex using them. In addition to discussing the various open source libraries out there, he'll be showing how you can implement them in your own Flex projects. Should be a can't-miss event. You can check out his blog at dougmccune.com.

[Read more →]

We settled on a location for the next OCFlex meeting. 'Bout time, right? Here's the finalized info:

Topic: Adobe AIR
Speaker: Evan Gifford
Date: December 6, 2007
Time: 7pm
Place: ASFusion Office
5 Park Plaza, Suite 200
Irvine, CA 92614

A couple of notes about getting there:

• The main building door is closed after hours. There will be somebody there to open it for you, but if you are late, please call 949-474-1763 so that somebody can come down and open it.
• There is a special elevator that goes only to the second floor. You need to take that one. It is on the right if you come from the back door, on the left if you come from the front.
• You can park on the back of the building. There is no parking fee after hours. 

See you there! 

For the next OCFlex meeting on December 6th we'll have one of our own members, Evan Gifford, speak about Adobe AIR. He'll be giving an overview of AIR, talking about it's capabilities and walking through some examples.

Evan Gifford is a senior Flex developer who's been whipping up RIAs since the days of Flash 4 and Macromedia Generator. He is the guy who started  the “community supported cairngorm goodness“ found at cairngormdocs.org, wrote the first true “TreeGrid” component for Flex and received an honorable mention at Adobe MAX 2007 for a Flex/AIR/LiveCycle project at Verizon Wireless.

If you are at all interested in learning more about Adobe AIR, this next meeting should not be missed. We're planning on changing the location to allow for the larger attendance we experienced at last month's meeting. We're working out the details for the new location, so stay tuned. We'll post location info next week.

OCFlex Meeting
Topic: Adobe AIR
Date: December 6, 2007
Time: 7pm
Location: TBD

Just a reminder that the first Orange County Flex User Group meeting is this Thursday, November 1st. If you're interested in Flex, at any level, feel free to swing by. We've already had members start signing up and some people from the community express interest in coming down and speaking.

The meeting will be a kind of introductory one with an agenda that includes member introductions, discussion of user group goals, means of communication, meeting places, topics for future meetings and speakers we'd like to have. For those of you who aren't familiar with Flex, we'll be doing an introduction to Flex 3 and a quick walkthrough of an application.

Don't forget to bring your business cards for a raffle for some Flex swag. Also, if you're planning on attending and have something "introductory" you'd like discussed, feel free to leave a comment. You can also become a member here. Although, it is not necessary to be a member to attend.

Date, time and location information can be found in the last post. See you there!

The first meeting of the Orange County Flex User Group will be on November 1st at 7pm. We know it's a ways away, but that gives us time to get the word out and let's people settle from the Adobe MAX 2007. At the meeting we'll be doing introductions, discussing speaker and event ideas, outlining our goals, as well as getting other things organized. Hope to see you there!

Meeting Info

Date
November 1st

Time
7pm

Place
Atomic Curve Office
1 Technology Drive, Suite J-709
Irvine, CA