Red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that supports streaming video, record, live stream publishing and AMF remoting and we’ll be having a good, long look at it next week at FlashBrighton. In fact, we’ve pulled off a hell of a coup. Not only do we have a great Red5 session lined up, we’ve got the main man Chris Allen himself presenting it! That’s right, you read that correctly my friend, creator of Red5, president of Infrared5, author and all round superman, Chris Allen is going to be with us to show us how to use it, this awesome bit of software! How cool is that?!

Well… we say ‘with us’, we kinda mean more ’streaming live from Stateside’. Chris will be with us virtually via the medium of “streaming Internet goodness”. He’s gonna show off some of the latest experiments and real world innovations built with the technology. Streaming video, live interactivity and push technology from Red5 combined with other Java APIs and native applications; basically some of the most cutting-edge content on the internet today. Chris’ll also walk us through building a simple Red5 application using the yet-to-be-released server-side AS3 capabilities on the way with Red5.

Seriously, how awesome is this? A lot awesome, that’s how awesome. Spaces are - as always, - limited so don’t delay fool, OMG REGISTER OVER AT UPCOMING RIGHT NOW !!!

Well, another successful and packed event at the werks… but enough about the Ruby on Rails coding dojo upstairs, what about FlashBrighton’s flexo?

After a slow start we eventually managed to load in some XML. The next hour was spend trying to work out how to actually access any of the data in it. Then in the last few minutes of the evening we changed the feed from atom to rss2, bound a few properties to a DataGrid, and whammy, our very own slate-blue-flex-skin-a-go-go rss feed reader.

Get the archived flex project here: fbsyndicatedblogrssreader.zip

From the producers of the ‘Carnival O Fun’ comes a new horizon in geek cinema. Starring “King of the Anim” Rich Mitch, “Compere with the gingerish hair” Seb Lee Delisle & “Bird with a BANG” Sarah Bird in a calamitous Christmas comedy caper, on December 9th 2008 “FlashBrighton & BANG Productions” bring you the “Big Screen Bonanza”! See what the critics might already be saying:

“The vewy best in Geek Cinema!” Jonathon Woss
“That cat video was funny” Jeremy Keith
“Sorry, Flash who? Look, we’ve got a cutting edge local paper to print, we don’t have time for this” The Argus

This time round, with 4 packed-to-the-rafters ‘Carnivals‘ already behind us, we’re not just taking the ante and upping it: we’re quadrupalling it! That’s right kids, not content with limiting your fun to mere 50 places anymore, we’ve only gone and booked the Sallis Benney, giving us a massive 200 seats of animated goodness for you!

On the night Rich Mitch will showcase an astonishing array of hand-picked animations for your delectation and delight, including a festive selection to get us in the holiday mood. The weather outside’ll be frightful, doubtless, but inside there’ll be music and moonlight and love and romance! And the odd awkward pause between reels. So come along!

Then it’ll be time for our “User Generated Christmas”, as Seb Lee-Delisle plays a selection of your YouTube favourites, festive or otherwise. There’ll be all sorts of prizes given away, including some for the best clips, with Seb’s infamous “Glowstick Voting” system counting the ballots. Attendees are invited - nay bloody-well encouraged - to send their favourite clips to jo.summers@gmail.com ahead of the date for the FlashBrighton production team to cut down into a side-splitting, spellbinding and seasonal shortlist. And good luck!

FlashBrighton will also be giving away its biannual major award to one of its members. As usual, you have to be there to win it!

Finally, Sarah Bird will wrap things up with a presentation from a very special guest. Guests in the past have included animators Cyriak and Bob Swain, of “Zombie Hotel” & “The Blue Man” fame, so expect quality. We’ll be keeping that one under wraps for juuuuust a little while longer…

A-thu-a-thu-a-thu-a-that’s all folks!

For now at least. Just make sure you register on Upcoming* right now, before all 200 seats get bagged by the staff at ClearLeft, or something.

* - Sign up on Upcoming and we’ll let you know AS SOON as tickets become available!

A team of coders, each spending 5 minutes in turn at the keyboard contributing to a single project; that is your classic ‘Coding Dojo’ format and it’s loads of fun. We’ve been using it for years here at FlashBrighton. We’ve been innovating the format too - changing this and altering that - and in that proud tradition we’ve only gone and done it again! That’s right, having taken the Dojo and turned it into the Flojo, we now give you the… FLEXO!

That’s right everyone, Flex Dojo is Gojo!

The ‘Flexo’ is a coding dojo using Abode Flex, a part of the Adobe suite that we could all benefit from knowing more about. We think that these things are best learned on-the-job, and we reckon a Flexo is an excellent way of doing that. You might be a Flex expert or a true novice, it doesn’t matter, the Flexo has something to offer anyone who wants to know more about Flex.

Every dojo needs it’s own project. FlashBrightonians might remember the game of Pong that we created together. It took a while, but it was a memorable and fun journey. Whilst it’s obviously an awesome game, Pong doesn’t really suit Flex - and we’ve already done that anyway - so we’ve got something a bit more appropriate to concentrate on this time. We’re gonna make a blog aggregator to display the various fascinating FlashBrighton member’s blogs posts.

It will take as long as it takes. We start next Tuesday. Come along.

Places are limited to 12, so be quick!

“Design Patterns” are common solutions to recurring problems in software design. A knowledge of Design Patterns will save you hours of time, bugfixing hell and frustrated clients. Perhaps you know this already, perhaps you’ve already planned your Strategy pattern, gone a coupla rounds with the Flyweight pattern and been KO’ed by the one, the only, heavyweight champion of the geek argument, the Singleton pattern. Nevertheless, for wearied campaigner and eager rookie alike there are always more combinations and angles to master and we’ve got just the team in our corner that can have you back in and swinging in no time.

On the bill next Tuesday we’ve got a big-hitting “Design Patterns” double-header of Madison Square Garden proportions for y’all!

First up: Super Flyweight and amateur historian Richard Willis is gonna surprise you with some “Design Patterns” history. The “Gang of Four” book that launched “Design Patterns” in software went to press 14 years ago but “Design Patterns” themselves are much older, 31 years old, and we’ll travel back to 1977 to see how they started and how that knowledge can help us today. Expect photos of street markets, pensioners, compost and churches.

Then, topping the bill, Brighton’s own undisputed heavyweight champions of geek Tom Kennett and Chris Sperry will show us a concrete example of how “Design Patterns” help us by highlighting a specific pattern implementation in ActionScript3: that of the AS3 Events Model. This after multiple requests for them to expand upon it following their popular Objects 101 talk at FlashBrighton earlier this year.

It’s a quick 1-2 that’s gonna knock you out. Seconds out, round 1: get ready to fight by registering over at Upcoming right now!

Characters! Animation! At night! Yes, join the fun as man-with-a-beard Tim Frost from Bull and Gate shows you the joy of creating just **wow** character animation, with the aid of Flash, anthropomorphic animal doodles and a beard*.

There’ll be:

1. A brief primer on basic animation techniques and theory;
2. Some chat about the different media that Flash animation is produced for;
3. A little bit about other animation tools;
4. Examples of Nice Work;
5. A beard*;

All followed by a group discussion about how animators are better than developers animators and developers can improve their workflow together.

Join in the fun by growing a beard and booking your seat over at Upcoming now!

* - Beard not essential. Charismatic, stylish and debonair, sure, not but essential

Next Tuesday at FlashBrighton the floor is wide open. You wanna show everyone your latest project? Great, bring it along. You wanna get some feedback on your work? Sure, we love seeing what people are up to. You wanna have a beer and sit around picking your navel? OK, just don’t flick the fluff around the place please.

Our new ‘Open Night’ meetings take our old ‘Projects Night’ meetings to the next level. ‘Project Night’ meetings were just about projects but ‘Open Night’ meetings have a wider remit. You can talk about anything you want to, there’s completely no agenda. That’s ‘open as in speech’ AND ‘open as in beer’. Only without a bar tab. Or a bar. Yep, it’s all about you lot and the great stuff you’re making!

On top of all the fantastic stuff you’re obviously gonna bring down this first ‘Open Night’ is gonna feature a chat about the fun stuff we’ll be doing during the festive month of December. Like the Xmas Carnival O’ Fun, a FlashBrighton party and Seb has got a little pub quiz up his sleeve that needs planning.

So come on down and mix it up! As per, you can register over at Upcoming whenever you like.

The challenge: in just 5 minutes sit down and make a telling contribution to someone else’s Flash project. One computer, one project and a whole room of people working in rotation to make it happen. That - as regular Flojoers will attest to - is your classic Flojo routine. And that… is not really what ‘Flash Pass the Parcel’* is about.

But it’s not far off! Imagine, if you will, a Flojo with not just one but shedloads of computers, and just as many projects. And imagine, if you can, that those projects are as varied as chalk and something not-very-similar-to-chalk, like gravy, churches, or a duck. Here a Flex app, there a cartoony animation. And imagine, if you can still be bothered, being involved and constantly changing from project to project, like a backpacker on a whistlestop tour of Europe. Wud dat not be toatlee orsum dood?

That’s right kids, ‘Flash Pass the Parcel’* is… well, yeah, just a Flojo with multiple machines, let’s not dress it up too much. But that’s cool, it means less sitting around watching over people doing stuff and more getting your hands dirty making cool shit. We’ve got a rough idea of how it’ll work but it’s all a bit ad hoc still so we’ll all just pitch in on the night and see what happens. Just bring along a laptop if you can and an idea of a SIMPLE, KEEP-IT-BLOODY-SIMPLE idea for a project to build that you think would be fun to make over a couple of hours.

Share your excitement about this thoroughly groundbreaking and inspiring new workshop format by signing up for it on Upcoming as per.

* - prizes awarded for a snappier title. Well, no prizes, but we’ll say ‘cool, thanks’ or something and you’ll get to feel good about it, briefly.

Preamble
For those of you interested in functional, usable information: next Tuesday at 7pm FlashBrighton will be meeting at the Cricketers in Brighton’s famous South Laine to talk about the recent “Flash on the Beach” conference, discuss the possibility of new collaborative projects and organise new sessions for the remainder of the year. You can register for the session on Upcoming.

For those of you interested in funny, stupid shit, please read on…

Another year, another Flash on the Beach and what exactly are we supposed to do after that?! If we understood aright all we heard it should be one of the following:

All in all, it was a bit much and 1,050 people walked away tired but inspired and spent most of the next day arguing about Jonathan Harris. Which still doesn’t answer the question: what exactly ARE we supposed to do after that?

The answer is… well, the answer is that we don’t really know but that’s OK cos next Tuesday we’re damn well going to find out! Now that John Davey’s Flashtastic cavalcade has rolled on until two thousand nine, it’s trusty little cousin FlashBrighton is returning to take the reins. And the agenda is WIDE OPEN!

That’s right kids: next Tuesday there’s no speakers, no sessions and no “The Werks”. Instead we’re going to take a deep breath, relax, grab a pint at the Cricketers and sit around chatting about what we as a group wanna do next. There’s two main things we wanna discuss:

Projects
Next Tuesday is - pinch, punch - the first day of the month and traditionally that means Projects Night. And traditionally that means Joe Chung turning up and telling us what he’s done to the Robot Wars app. Now we love Joe for his tirelewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeee444444444445 sorry, cat just stood on keyboard. Whilst we obviously worship Joe for his tireless dedication to pixel-based slam death-matching it would be nice to have a collaboration involving more people, or a coupla them running simultaneously or something like that. Previously we’ve tried to set the agenda on projects upfront, with varying degrees of success. This time we’re encouraging greater participation by asking you guys to rock on up and decide between yourselves what you wanna do. Get thee down to the Cricketers next Tuesday and get your projection in first!

Sessions:
We have projects, we also have sessions. Only at the moment the schedule is a bit thin. No dramas tho, cos we’ve got a big old list of session ideas, requests and suggestions mined off the FlashBrighton listserv and we need to go through these and work out “whas hapnin” for the next “woteva” months. So take the FlashBrighton by the horns next Tuesday by turning up and emitting sounds from out your mouth.

That’s it kids! In short: beer and conversation. A classic combination, how can you refuse? Even if all you wanna do is sit around and bitch how much you hate Jonathan Harris.

Only joking, we love Jon really. Just make sure you get on over to Upcoming and login for a real-life post-FOTB chatroom right now.

Adobe gave us a ticket for Flash on the Beach to give away to a member of FlashBrighton! Woo!

Because we like to make you work for your prizes, and we thought our blog could do with a bit of sprucing up, we set up a competition to design a Masthead for our blog!

The winner will get their design put on the site, and win a ticket for the Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton next week.

We had four entries, all MASTer pieces! Click on the link to view them…

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