Austin Flex User Group

UPDATE: Our seed topic for May’s meeting will indeed be “Modules”. This specifically refers to creating and using Modules in Flex development, but any conversation about modular development practices and experiences will be welcome.

Also, let’s go ahead and plan to meet at Opal’s on 6th again. That seems to be a good spot, overall. But again, please let me know if always meeting downtown is preventing you from coming to meetings.

May’s meeting will be on the 20th. Not sure about topic, yet – maybe we’ll pick back up with how to use Modules to make your life easier.

Location to be determined. Let me know if you have an opinion or request. As it stands right now, I’d say there’s a 75% chance of meeting at Opal Divine’s again, and a 25% chance of meeting at the CSC building at Congress and Colorado.

If continuing to meet downtown makes it difficult for you to come to meetings, let me know (public at rosshenderson dot info).

Stay tuned for the exciting decisions for May’s meeting…

It was a small group this month, but it was another great meeting. Thanks to those who made it out in the pouring rain.

I had to leave early, but got a lot out of the conversations and show-and-tells on iPad/iPhone development, modular design, and Phillipe’s product. I’m sure I missed some great stuff.

If you haven’t heard, James Ward will be in town next week speaking at the Java User Group (see post).

An excellent change of plans for this month’s meeting. Instead of dealing with Modules this month, Brendan (Meutzner) will be giving a presentation on the ability to author and export Flash content to the ipa format for iPhone/Touch and iPad applications.

The presentation will include running through a basic app, how to setup a developer account with Aple, and the compiling of app to ipa format.

Not that Modules are unimportant – not at all – but with the impending release of CS5, and the recent release of the iPad, this is the hotness.

Incidentally, check out this upcoming pad running Android (and supporting Flash Player): http://is.gd/biZqh

A lot of folks showed up to last month’s meeting, so we’re going to stick with the downtown Opal Divine’s location for this month. Check the sidebar for address and map.

We haven’t had any presentations for awhile, so this month we’ll start things off with a short basic presentation about Modules.

If anyone who is planning to be at the meeting has depth with Modules and would be willing to follow the short and basic presentation with a more in-depth presentation, please let me know (public at rosshenderson dot info).

Alternatively, if you are someone who does not have experience with Modules, but would like to take this opportunity to get smart about them and present your findings to the group next Thursday, also let me know.

Everyone else, please bring your own experience and/or questions about Modules, and modular approaches in general – what they are, why they are useful, how you implemented, etc.

Remember, the monthly topics are mostly intended to just get things started, and are meant to be something that you can spend prep on in 0 – 15 minutes. If you even want to prepare, that is.

Thanks to everyone who showed up for the March meeting. We had about a dozen people, and a lot of interesting conversations.

Some rough notes about resources and things to know about, from the March meeting, follow below. This is just meant as a list of things to kind of browse through. Some of the items have URLs and descriptions, some you’ll have to Google.

Please let me know if you have anything you’d like to add.

balsamiq.com — Mockup application
Flex4 for free for the unemployed on FB
stackoverflow.com — Knowledge exchange
lynda.com — great source for video tutorials
bytearray.org

Aptana and NetBeans as potential development environments for Mac
Flex Bugs and Butterflies blog

Farata Systems
Gorilla Logic
Alex Harui
Tinic Uro
iamDeepa
Christophe Conraets

APE — actionscript physics engine http://cove.org/ape

Books
Flash Math Creativity
Coders at Work (codersatwork.com)
Flex Cookbook

Alice and Scratch programming languages, as good introductions to object oriented programming