Flash Resources

Just wanted to let you know about a few great Flash/Macromedia/Adobe resources that are available to you.

First is the mail lists at FigLeaf Software. These have been so valuable to me over the years - whenever I have trouble, I turn to these first. There are many different topics available and you can search the archives!

http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/apache2-default/

The second is a great blog aggregator with an interesting name where you can sort by product of interest.

http://fullasagoog.com/

The third is Macromedia's News Aggregator

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/

I'd be missing out if I missed the Adobe side of things...

http://blogs.adobe.com/

Bookmark these sites and view them often to find out the latest news in the Adobesphere.

If you've known about these sites for a while, post a comment and give some feedback - or drop your favorite resource into the comments to share with other group members!

Target Sued Over Inaccessible Website

I found this little tidbit on WebAIM, a site that deals with accessibility for the disabled.

"Target, a large retailer in the United States, has been sued by the National Federation of the Blind and a blind UC Berkeley student due to the inaccessibility of its web site. This will no doubt be an important lawsuit"

You are wondering why I'm posting this? When I went to the Target site, I noticed that there is ALOT of FLASH used. I'm wondering if using Flash is what is making in considered inaccessible. That could mean problems for Flash users!

UPDATE: Jason added a comment, and since comments aren't seen automatically I'll mention:
here are examples and explanations on how Flash can be used to create a site that can be used by all. http://www.webaim.org/techniques/flash/

Online Social Events calendar

I was at the Creative Congress and bumped into Ron Suarez from MediaRica.com, whom I know from my days of being in the Macintosh user group MacTechnics in the mid to late 80's. Ron was filling me in on what he is doing these days, and mentioned the social events listing hotspot Upcoming.org. I just finished signing up there and posted our next meeting as an event in their calendar. Maybe we will get some new faces as a result.

Ron was recording the Creative Congress so that it could be podcast. I don't see a link on the MediaRica site though. Actually his weblog has not been updated since Nov 2005! If a number of us email him he might find it worthwhile to get the thing up sooner rather than later. Ron has a podcast on podcasting you might want to check out

Great turnout for the Creative Congress 2006

... and a winner!!

Congrats go out once again to the winner of our Flash 8 Professional raffle, Erin Zurney!

Overall it was a great turnout and a successful visit for our User Group. We had 75 people enter into the raffle for Flash 8. It was great meeting everyone and very nice talking with all the creative industry folk that showed up. I love meeting with people who are just a passionate about their career or hobby as I am.. it's always interesting conversation and I usually end up learning more than a thing or two through the exchange.


A big thanks to Misty and Angie, for help with getting everything together for the event, I couldn't have done it without them.

For those who may not know Misty or Angie, Misty is the User Group Marketing Coordinator and Angie is our User Group Webmaster.

I will definitely be looking for more events like this one which gives us a chance to get out the word about our group and meet more great people!

FREE classes on Hewlett-Packard's HP.com site

I was on the HP site looking for some info and noticed they have some FREE online seminars / classes. I just signed up for an XML class. To find the classes, go to the small / medium business computer area of the site click here. On that page you will find a link for the free courses. (I don't know how dependable all the links are, that is why I'm taking you to the one offered)

Getty buys iStockPhoto for $50 Mil

..via UltraShock and the thread link

iStockphoto, the world's most popular stock photography website, has announced that it has been acquired by Getty Images, Inc, the world’s largest stock photo company. This acquisition gives Getty Images the leading micropayment stock photo site with a proven community-focused business model boasting millions of loyal customers.

Total Training focus for February Meeting

We have a new sponsor - their name is Total Training.

They have been gracious enough to sign on and support our User Group! They have donated one of their latest products; Total Training for Macromedia Flash 8 Professional for use by our User Group. This is a very generous donation. ($299 value!)

Check out the great course outline and all that is offered in this training DVD-ROM.

Total Training has also given each member of our group a CD with 2 total hours of free training covering 9 Adobe products! You can receive your free CD training at this month's meeting!

As if that wasn't enough - they've also extended a 10% off offer on products as a welcome.

Due to this exciting new addition to our sponsor roster, I felt that it would be a great focus for this month's meeting. Take a look at the course outline for the Flash 8 Training and place your vote in the comments for the area you'd like to see on February 27th. Top vote getters win. I think we'll have time to watch two complete sections as they range from about 30 minutes to 55 minutes per section.

Definitely take some time to check out Total Training's product offerings as the value of training for the money is a great deal!

Comments on the blog

I just enabled the blog so that comments can be left without being a blogger member. As long as we don't have problems with this setting I'll keep it enabled. - The FlashFocused Blogmeister

Studio 8 Online Live 1 Hour Seminar Series

Thought I'd give folks the heads up on some upcoming online live seminars for various Adobe/Macromedia products. They are 1 hour in length, and you might win a FREE product to boot! Click here for dates and to sign up

Introduction to Flash Professional 8
Easy web video with Flash Professional 8 and Dreamweaver 8
Introduction to Studio 8
Introduction to Dreamweaver 8
Best Practices: A closer look at CSS and XML in Dreamweaver 8

FlashFocused at the Creative Congress

We will be in attendance representing our User Group at the Creative Congress on February 21st. If you have the chance to come out to this event it will be well worth your time. This is a great opportunity to network and speak with peers working in similar industries.

We will have a table setup, and will be holding a business card raffle for a full licensed version of Flash 8!!



This is a fantastic opportunity to promote the group and it's members - so this is an open call to any member who would like their Flash work featured at our table during the expo portion of this event. We probably won't have internet connection, but if you can get me the project files - we'll just run it locally and show off your talent! Flash artists, animators, programmers - let's show them what we've got!

Forta on Getting Started with Flex and CF

Ben has posted some great articles on his blog today. If you are interested in seeing how to use Flex Builder 2 / Flex Enterprise Services tied into a ColdFusion backend - he's posted two entries to help out.

The first is "Getting Started With ColdFusion and Flex Enterprise Services"

The second is "ColdFusion Sample Flex2 Application"

Both are great examples of how remoting works with Flex.

Adobe has also announced and Sho Kuwamoto has confirmed in his blog entry - that they will be offering the Flex SDK and Flex Enterprise Services for free. Yes - you read it right - FREE! The Flex Builder application is expected to sell for approximately $1000 per developer. This is the IDE that is used to create Flex 2 applications and is based on the Eclipse IDE. As I posted earlier, you can get the beta versions of all the above mentioned right now from the Labs site.