Post AtlMMUG Flash App Meeting

Meeting went good last night. Got to meet a few other peeps that I’ve talked to online, but didn’t get to talk long; guess they’re the responsible type who don’t go drinking after such meetings. This adult stuff blows.

At any rate, I’ve had a few things I wish I could do better. The crowd had a lot of new faces in it, and while coding and writing some notes before the meeting, I listened intently to what the crowd talked about to gauge their expectations. It seemed a few really hadn’t had much experience with Flash, while a ton had jobs like me. I figured it was best to dummy down a lot of what I talked about, and instead focus on overall technologies, and spit out some of the tips I’ve run into. Didn’t really go as planned as I wasn’t getting the reactions I needed out of the crowd; usually, I can use body language from a person to determine how my communication is working with them; same thing with a crowd, but I’m guessing either I was talking way too fast + talking very technical, or it was just a deep subject. It was definately more interactive than my Flashcom talk a year ago, but I feel I need to be more proactive pre-meeting to ensure audience expectations. I didn’t get into the minutae on purpose, but there were a lot of people there I thought maybe could benefit from it.

At any rate, one .NET’r brought up an interesting piont that I didn’t get to finish talking about. He was like, “What does Macromedia expect Central to have that appeals to a .NET’r that already has Smart Client?” My succinct answer to that is: .NET’rs can do what they do best; code their .NET web services, and code them well. Central can do what Flash does best and focus on the Rich GUI consuming those web services.

As always, I learn more about public speaking the more I do this. If Leif get’s it captured (since Flashcom didn’t work out), then I’ll post later in the week.

Thanks for those who came; need to make after hours time next time so we can geek out longer!

16 Replies to “Post AtlMMUG Flash App Meeting”

  1. Jesse,

    Your speech last night went really well. Its highly admirable that you can get up in front of a crowd and verbally string together your thoughts as fast as you do. However, if you are looking to improve, I would say slow down, give people a chance to interact. I think you went so fast a lot of the people there may not have been able to process it, especially if they werent familiar with some of the subjects. I have to say your gestures are highly animated (lets the audience feel your enthusiasm about the subject), so its hard for people to nod off even if you slow it down a bit.

    I dont know if anyone hung out last night, but I felt sick and just wanted to go to sleep. As far as people getting together and talking, I’m all for it. I’ve been talking with others of doing something informal here in Atlanta. It would be nice for fellow developers to get together on a non presentation basis and talk about what they are doing, how they are doing things, ideas, etc. Basically nerd out if you will. Its important to progress from learning from others and I’d like to see an outlet that we could have for doing that.

  2. Yeah, I should of taken the hint from Leif about “taking a breath”. It’s just such a cool feeling to show work to peeps.

    I think Thursday eve’s are usually cool since people have families and lives on Friday’s. Whatever you suggest as a get together place will probably fly with me.

  3. Sounds good. What kind of venue do you guys want to use? It may be hard to go out to eat if we have a large group. It might be possible to get a meeting room at my work, but Im not sure. In that case, the group size would need to be smaller.

  4. It was a cool meeting. You did go pretty fast, but I figured you were worried about squeezing everything into 2 hour time span. You went over a LOT of stuff last night.

    As for the target audience, I think you are probably used to talking about Flash with other super-skilled folks, so it’s easy to forget that not everyone at these user group meetings has done the more advanced stuff. There was a guy sitting by me that had never used Flash at all…but then again, that’s not YOUR fault.

    If you’re worried about losing everyone, start your presentations by asking some questions to the audience to get a feel for their experience level, and go from there…

    Thanks for a tips on using MX2004 with Screenweaver, too.

  5. I knew I shoulda’ asked the crowd. Cool man, thanks for the advice; I’ll actually act on it next time.

    As for Screenweaver, heck yeah, anytime!

  6. Sounds like you geeks need a house party! Some saturday afternoon geekfest that has computers and beer nearbye!

  7. Hey! I had beer afterward at that little hotel bar next door with fellow geek Mark Blottner. Where were you? Oh, and I asked that question and I’m NOT a .NET person.

    Yee haw,
    Brent

  8. What struck me about your question was that you said, “…what does it offer a .NET person…”. To me, I thought of it as a competing product, not an alternative product, so I was a bit taken aback, and thought it a cool perspective that I hadn’t thought about.

    For future instances, I love brrrr!!!

  9. It’s sorta like the CF vs ASP thing. What’s more common? ASP. Yes I see them as competing products. I have this scenario in mind of some Flash dude trying to convince the caring and understanding IT department to deploy central in addition to/instead of .NET.

    Has anyone ever paid $99?

    Cheers,
    Brent
    DarbyMedia

  10. Well I for one greatly enjoyed it Jesse. I told my wife afterwards “it was like listening to a cross between Albert Enstein and a surfer dude hopped up on speed” ;)

    More importantly, I did nab several good practical structural tips from the sample code you walked through.

    So entertaining and informative. How can I ask for more?

    Heck, there was even brief nudity.

  11. You freak! You’ve gotten me obsessed with Central now. I want to enable totallyradio with it but alas no wma support. Advice is nice.

    Cheers,
    Brent

  12. Sorry, passed out last night for 12 hours, and then school finals this morning. I’m guessing from a quick visit to their site that they are a personal web radio CMS. Flash does not support WMV, nor ASF.

    What Flash does support is MP3, WAVE, and FLV. FLV & MP3 support are both supported in Flash 6; FLV loaded from Flashcom, or inserted at authortime. MP3 via Sound.loadSound, or streaming (no-cached) via Flashcom. FLV’s are supported dynamically loaded via Flash Player 7.

    When I had hard-drive space, I used my JXL radio to play some mp3’s I did. Until I move my server this weekend, it won’t be back up, but till then, here’s a simple loadSound example:

    https://www.jessewarden.com/jxllizzite/radio.html

    The source code is incluced. It’s simply a Flash mp3 player that plays a list of mp3’s. I’ve been trying to implement a mini-mp3 player via Central, but never got the time to do so.

    If you do not wish to spend the dough on Flashcom, nor your client, you can either upload your mp3’s, or use a PHP/Perl script to access a SHOUTCast stream. You can do this as long as you reload the Flash sound object from time to time since Flash doesn’t get rid of the memory it’s using. Here’s the PHP code version:

    http://www.pixelplay.org/jeff/test3/

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