RIAction Singapore - the big 3's in RIA come together!

After a successful TAC, the Flex User Group here in Singapore presents - RIAction. Its a - first of its kind - one day Rich Internet Apps 'event' sponsored by the 3 ultimate names in RIAs - Adobe, Google and Microsoft. There will be sessions on Adobe Flash platform, Microsoft Silverlight, and AJAX based RIA development. And there will be non-technical sessions about effective RIA development methodologies as well! February 26th 2009 is the date, and Microsoft Singapore, the venue. Since the sponsors picked up all the costs, attendance to the event itself would be free!

Special thanks to Shunjie Hu, the Singapore FUG manager, for arranging this event in record time.

Learn more about the event here. If you'd like to attend the event, please register your details here.

See you at RIAction!

Singapore Flex UserGroup - February meet

With Flex 3.0 ( and AIR1.0 and BlazeDS source, and flex source and, and...) being released this morning, this month's FUG meetup is time to celebrate! We have a couple of sessions this time around. The agenda as per Shunjie's UG invite mail is as below:

What:
7.00pm - 8.05pm : Session 1 - Test Driven Development by Thye Yeow Bok
BREAK
8.25pm - 9.30pm : Session 2 - Flex 3 / AIR 1.0 Live! by Hu Shunjie

When and Where:

27th February 2008, Wednesday, between 7.00pm to 9.30pm

at

Adobe Singapore,
PageMaker Room,
8 Temasek Boulevard,
#06-02, Suntec Tower Three,
Singapore 038988

You can register for the event by responding to the thread here:
Registering will help us make sure we have enough seats available in the meeting Room at adobe ;)

If anyone's willing to go for a beer after the sessions, I'd be game. See you all there!

Singapore FUG meet - 14th nov 2007

This post has been overdue for a longtime now, blame it on my laziness.

We had the first FUG meet in Singapore on Wednesday evening. It was a great start, I should say. We had more attendees than we expected. Finally looks like the UG meetings here are starting to become more interactive! And to top it up, we had a good bunch of adobe folks joining in!!

Unlike last year (and before) this year Adobe decided not to 'MAX' in Singapore.

Marianne Young, our contact point for the UG activities in Singapore had attended the MAX conference at Europe. And for this UG meet she agreed to do a presentation about things she saw and liked at MAX. Sorta like a highlight. To be honest, I was expecting just a simple presentation with pics she probably snapped during live presentations. Boy! She went ahead and collected real demo material that was used in the actual MAX presentations. A whole bunch of them!! And did a great session to kick start the meeting.

Her session included demos for Flash player 10 - hydra, text improvements etc, thermo, etc. Thanks Marianne, you are awesome!

And during the presentation we had a surprise guest peeking in. Prayank Swaroop, the Flex Evangelist for Asia Pacific is in Singapore for some internal projects and he dropped by at the meet as well. And so did Jack Lim, the BD manager for Enterprise BU from adobe. Suddenly our small little user group meet looked so filled up with celebs ;o)

The second session was from our own homeboy, Lionel/Flashmech. He presented about the PV3D based Effects classes that Tink has put through. Like his session before in the FSUG meet, he did a very impressive job here too!





We also had Stefano Virgilli of AdobeSoftwares.com join us in the meet! Its great to have you Stefano in Singapore!.
He did a brief intro about the upcoming Flex camp and other events. Check out the event pages here:

http://flexcamp-singapore.eventbrite.com/
http://cs3-mobile-workflow.eventbrite.com/
http://flash-lite-integration.eventbrite.com/

I'll be attending the FlexCamp for sure. Haven't decided about the rest yet.


And ArulKumaran mentioned that he will be in India for the next couple months. You'll be missed in the upcoming UG events!

I got a few more pics of the event on my picasaweb album

Thanks everyone for coming. And thanks to Shunjie for putting things together to make the event happen :)

See you all at the next month's event! Go ahead and post your thoughts about what sessions you'd like to see next month here

Singapore Flex User Group meeting

After a couple of months of silence, the Singapore Flex User Group is back again. Its got its own home now - and we have a forum set up as well for discussions.

The first meetup of singapore FUG is gonna happen on the 14th of November. Check out the details here. If you are in singapore, and are excited about Flash platform development and Flex in particular, do join us for the meet!

Adobe will be sponsoring some food and drinks, and Shunjie has promised to give away some free eclipse as well ;o)

Singapore Flash Usergroup meet - MoM

I'm just back from the Singapore Flash Usergroup meeting, for the month of July. It was a day of information overload! We started off at 10 AM, and ended the sessions at adobe (the venue for the meet) at around 1:45 PM, and a few of us then continued to discuss about the future sessions etc., over lunch. In short, it was a saturday, well spent!

Ryan started off with a overview of what today's sessions were gonna be. He also talked about the FSUG site, and his Flex (and AIR) experiments on the site, using the RSS feeds for his forum. Am still amazed about how this guy single handedly handles a site that heavy; not to mention, He has a busy day job as well!

Then followed 3 full length sessions - Hu Shunjie started off with a session on AIR. He showed how the AIR commandline utilities ADT and ADL coupled with flashDevelop can be used to create AIR applications. He also demonstrated a few sample applications he had been developing using AIR. Everyone seemed to enjoy his icicle application ;o)

And then Lionel aka Flashmech started off his session where he showcased a few interesting flash extensions that he found around the web. Boy, this guy had a huge collection of extensions installed! I assume He must be hosting a detailed writeup about the extensions he demo-ed today, in his blog. Watch out his space!

And then there was this lousy presentation by yours truly. I had a tiny presentation that I aimed at 'demystifying Flex' to newbies. I spoke a little about the history of Flash based RIAs and then continued to talk about how flex came into being what it is now. But to be honest, though I've been following the developments in the flex world, I haven't really written any flex application that really does anything interesting. So I made this presentation a perfect reason to attempt something worthwhile. I wrote up a complete newbie style Flex application using the beta of FlexBuilder 3, which takes a tag as an input from the user and searched Flickr for pictures associated with the tag, and displayed them in a TileList component.

In total I spent about 1 hour building the application on stage - in the process also explaining the flickr REST API. I could've used the AS3 API for Flickr, but I did also want to demonstrate how easy it was to consume a REST response and parse it up using E4X. Luck was my side, and without any major glitches, the app was up and running! ( I've uploaded the files here)

We had Arul Kumaran attending the sessions today as well, and being an early Flex adopter, I could see him all irked by the lousy coding I was doing ;o) But like I said there, it was a demo of how a novice Flex developer could write some working flex application, in about an hour's time :D

Aftermath:
After the sessions, we walked over a bit to a food court, for lunch, and discussed on a wide range of subjects, ranging from future usergroup sessions to general tech stuff to velvetpuffin to movies. There was a whole lot of enthusiasm in everyone, which was great to see!

We finally parted around 4:30, after a whole load of geektalk. Expect to see a lot of improvements in the FSUG activities soon!

Thanks to all attendees, and thanks Adobe ( and Marian specially) for helping us with the venue and those donuts!

FSUG ( Singapore Flash User Group) meet - June 09 2007

Am back home after attending the Singapore Flash Users Group meet at adobe's office in Singapore.

It was tiny little gathering of people, not just designers and developers but there was an art director, a solution architect and a couple of students as well. There were three sessions in all; Marianne, a solutions engineer at adobe started off with a brief session on how Device Central CS3 allows integration between different CS3 applications. She showed how Adobe Illustrator CS3 could work together with Device Central CS3.

Then there was this intro session to Flash CS3 by Ryan, the founder of FSUG. He demonstrated how skinning V3 components was easier, the new actions panel features, and the 'copy motion to AS3' feature. He also demo-ed an advt banner which doubled up as a game; it was put together by two ploytechnic students, at the adobe Leadership Forum over the last week. I liked their concept behind the game. Pretty cool. (Hope they put it up online somewhere)

The final session was by Alvin of 3D sense media school, about how remoting could be achieved with Flash CS3 and AS3.0, by directly using the NetConnection class. He also spoke about Flourine and AS3LRF . He'd put together a small blogging application as a demo as well.

We also heard that Mike Downey is gonna be in city sometime next week, to be talking to customers about apollo. Looking forward to meet him there.

Next meet is gonna have our own Shunjie Hu talking about apollo. Hope to see more people join us for the same.

Thanks to the program manager at adobe who made this meeting possible. She was a sweet lady, and I forgot her name!! [UPDATE: her name is WEE LENG. Thanks Sandeestar for pointing it out, and to Ronnie for correcting me on Marianne's name. Am so bad with names!!] Also thanks to Ryan and all the attendants!

Singapore Flash User Group meet on 9th June 2007

Its been over 7 months since I moved to Singapore, and I'm gonna be attending my first Singapore Flash User Group meet here in Singapore on 9th June( saturday). So guys, if you are in Singapore this weekend, do drop by at Adobe's office here.

Here are the details of the venue and the timings:

Date:	9 Jun 2007
Time:	10AM - 1PM
Venue:	Adobe Office, PageMaker Room 8 Temasek Boulevard #06-02 Suntec Tower Three Singapore 038988

This would be my first real chance to meet up with fellow actionscript developers ( and designers) in Singapore. So am looking forward to this event. Thanks to MAX2006, I did meet a few people, but I was busy catching up with the visiting celebrities most of the time;o)

For more details about the event, go here.