Ok no no no... I don't need some people in trench coats to help scare old women! Come on people! Do you use Adobe Flash and live in the DFW area? Well your in luck things are slowly starting to come together on our very own Dallas FUG or as a few of us like to call it the actionscript mafia. We are having a couple struggles getting things moving so if your interested and/or can help run over to dallasfug.com and see what your missing out on!
Do you love you some Flash? Are you a flash developer? Are you a flash designer?
Did you answer yes to one of these questions and you live in Dallas, Tx? I sure hope so!
I have been thinking about getting the Dallas flash community closer. How you ask? Well, how else! Get us all together for a few beers and a little actionscripting! 
In all seriousness I am hoping to find about 10-20 Flash guru's that want to get together to start collaborating and teaching each other some tips and tricks. We have a great community here of Flash developers with a lot of talent and I think its time we start tapping into it. I haven't worked out ANY details as of yet. I really just wanted to try and get a head count of who might be interested. So if you don't mind helping with the cause and emailing your fellow flash buddies, that would be great! Who says Dallas can't do what the other big cities are doing? Now lets see what we are capable of!
I will start gathering a list, so if you guys could either emailing me or comment on this post about your interest that would be great. Then in about a week or so I will gather up all the emails and see how many people we have intrested and go from there. Also if you are interested in speaking to the group or have a facility that we could all meet up at I would be very interested! My email is corbanb[at]gmail[dot]com. I can't wait to hear from you all.
Update: I don't have any location details but I am thinking like the second Wednesday of the month after work. Like 7 - 8PM possibly.
Hey guys last night I got my invite key to the blist beta site. Its a pretty interesting Flex app for sharing a database with friends, family and really anyone you want to. Anyway if any of you guys are interested in seeing what they have built comment below and I will share the love.
I really want to know what you guys think of this app and how you might see it useful to you. Right now I am not seeing how I could potentially use it but maybe I am missing something. Mostly I see myself browsing docs others are sharing. Maybe it would be fun to keep some tutorials I want to put together in a blist doc. That way all you guys would be able to edit and improve the code in them. To build a better database of scripts we all regularly use. Whata you think?
Update: The guys at blist put up there live demo from DEMO today if you are interested in watching it also.
So I have been reading these types of posts:
http://www.reflektions.com/miniml/template_permalink.asp?id=456
http://aralbalkan.com/1126
and wondering what is gong to be happening with flash. And if you guys are going to be killing off the mid to low flash developers as time goes by and on into the new flash players etc?
So here is my questions:
Why are we making it more difficult for non programmers to pick up actionscript and play with it? It used to be so easy for many types of designers/developers to open flash and instantly get a lot out of it. It seems like you have wanted to cater to the few that bitched about actionscripts non traditional programming format and not to the designers turned developers. Now we have gone into the AS3 days where we can't code on buttons (which is fine for me but maybe hard for others) and we can hardly code on the timeline for that matter. We are needing to start hiring engineers almost to develop flash sites now because its become so complicated to understand this new programming language. I mean this is what made flash so amazing in the past. I went to art school and got a job dong flash. And in two years I could code great sites and simple games. Now I am able to do about anything in AS2 but moving to AS3 has been a huge leap cause OOP is a completely new concept. And I think it is for MANY non traditional developers and developers wanting to pickup a product like flash WAS.
What does this mean to the future of flash? Are we going to see the traditional advertising flash sites start to fail due to budget and demand for creative engineers (which are few and far between) that want alot of money. Are you guys developing a product for app developers? Or for the MASS amounts of AS2 developers out here creating great creative work. I mean do you think flash would be where it is if it wasn't for designers to be able to open flash read a few tutorials and start tweaking code. The imperfections of actionscript coding style is what made it so appealing to SO many people worldwide. No longer can a creative director understand how to tweak a AS3 site without a tremendous amount of ramp up time to learn OOP concepts.
This new community you are trying to build is great for Flex/AIR but terrible for Flash. The creative appeal is falling away and now becoming a DEVELOPERS playground and not a 'devigners'/designers playground. You are going to find less and less designers converting to developers as time goes on making the gap that much wider between the two. And much harder for businesses to communicate between the two departments. Which will again kill the creative appeal to flash. All I ask is please be careful what you do with our precious flash. And don't forget about the mass amounts of developers that made flash what it is. By coming from a design background to become self taught flash developers who helped create the product you have today!
