De Monster stickers
Ferdi and Paul will be speaking at Flash at the Lake in Zürich next week and Paul will speak again at the Adobe User Group (Dutch site) in Amsterdam the week after. During both events we will demo the first working version of Blackbox and introduce Blackbox Stream. To celebrate this Monster milestone, since last time we publicly showed anything besides the MonsterDebugger was during Flash in the Can in Amsterdam, we decided to make the first Monster goodies: De Monster stickers (detailed version).

During both Flash at the Lake and the Adobe User Group the stickers can be yours. Imagine having your own Monsters at your side, knowing they won’t be hiding under the bed or in the closet but anywhere you want them to.

If for some reason you won’t be able to make it to these events but you do want to get your hands on some cool Monsters, send us an envelope containing another envelope (please add enough stamps) with your name and address on it and we’ll return it filled with Monsters.

Business cards
Since we’ve been creating new tiny Monsters, we thought it to be a good idea to also update our own Monsters. First results can be seen below (detailed version):

Maybe you notice the orange Monster (me) is missing. This is because we’re making a case out of the creation process. During the entire process Joeri used the first Blackbox prototype to document all his steps and thoughts. Most of his design decisions are about concept art, aesthetics, usage of light and color, but also strategic decisions for the future. At the moment Joeri and I are working on this case, so hopefully we can share this very soon on this blog.

Little bit about Joeri

To give Joeri the credits he deserves, I want to end this article by telling a little bit about him. Joeri Léfevre is a part time Monster who helps us by making Monster concept art and illustrations. He has an MA degree in Game Design and works part time as art teacher at Utrecht School of the Arts. Coming September he will be taking classes again at the Classic Academy for painting in Groningen to grow even more skill wise. In case you wonder, yes Joeri does a lot of freelance work so feel free to contact him or us if you want to hire him. By the way, this is his portfolio.

Flash at the Lake is an initiative by the Swiss Flash User Group and is organized by Andres Lorenz, Marcel Vogt, Michel Wacker and Tiago Dias. During the two day conference at the Rote Fabrik flash designers, developers, project managers, graphic designers and JAVA/C developers are invited to join some interesting sessions and workshops. Of course we can expect some great parties as well. 

But for De Monsters it is serious business as well as we will be roaring about some of our greatest passions: Blackbox and development in AIR and beyond. 

Paul will give a session on Blackbox titled: Making of Blackbox, the next application by De Monsters, the description of the session is:

During the projects that we all work on, creativity is key; finding the right solutions for the problems we face every day makes or breaks a project. But this creative process is  very difficult to grasp and even harder to communicate about. When your team grows this becomes even more difficult as different disciplines sometimes seem to work on different wavelengths. And with the waterfall model in place, essential elements of design and development decisions get lost and the overall quality and fun goes down.

De Monsters have been working on this problem of mapping a creative process, showing where you stand and base your decisions on and communicating about it with your entire team. In this talk you get to see how we do this, where we base our design decisions on and what you can expect when you can get your hands on Blackbox.

Ferdi will host not one, but two four hour workshops where he will share some of his experience in working with and extending Adobe AIR. 

Advanced AIR Workshop
If you’ve heard the buzz and played around with Adobe AIR, this workshop will bring your skills to the next level by creating a fully functional email client in Adobe AIR. You will learn how to work with socket connections, native windows, offline data and file formats. Note: The coding in this workshop will be done with FlexBuilder 3.

Extending AIR Workshop
Although Adobe AIR is a great product, there are times where you need some extra desktop functionality. While fighting the headache from the awesome party the day before, this workshop will give you a complete and practical guide to extending the functionality of Adobe AIR by using the Qt SDK (an open source cross-platform application and UI framework). During the workshop you will create an Adobe AIR application that is capable of doing the two most requested features: Making screenshots and opening files with their native application.

To check out the descriptions for the sessions by the other speakers you should check out the official speakers page. The final schedule is expected to follow soon, so keep an eye on http://www.fatl.ch and FlashAtTheLake on Twitter.

One of the greatest things about the conference is the fact that pricing is very reasonable. Tickets for the conference are on sale for only €135,-, which is an absolute bargain for a conference like this. So go to http://www.fatl.ch  and get your tickets, it would be great to see you there and have a couple of beers together. We hope to see you there!

GRAWH!

De Monsters in Zürich.

Sandro showing the tree structure.

Sandro showing the inspector which works almost the same as Firebug.

Sandro showing advanced traces.

Sandro showing method testing (and one of the best logos ever!)

Links:
De MonsterDebugger site
De MonsterDebugger at Google Code
Debugging Example
Tweetr – AS3 Twitter Library used in the example
The entire presentation (9 slides)

Monsters and beer!

If you want to showcase De MonsterDebugger, let us know and we’ll hook you up with some images, additional information and some goodies for you to hand out (Sandro: what’s your tshirt size?).

Tonight Paul and Ferdi will be interviewed about De MonsterDebugger and Blackbox by Jeffry Houser and John Wilker from The Flexshow. The entire interview should be online next month.