This Thursday over 20 different speakers are all set to inspire the audience on various different subjects. Divided over the three session tracks there are speakers such as Dave August from OOO-ii, Ralph Hauwert, Group94, Layar, Hanazuki and our good friend Tobias Mannewitz from KARAKTER. Not to forget the Adobe Evangelists Serge Jespers and Jason Levine who will hopefully show some cool new stuff from Adobe. And to top it off there are also three tracks of workshops where you can get your hands dirty with Unity 3D (Paul Tondeur), FDT (Maxim Zaks), Photoshop (Deke McClelland) and much more.

Obviously we are very excited that we are amongst the group of people who are presenting during the Adobe User Group XL. During the Monster session, Paul and Ferdi will talk about and show Blackbox. We will go into design decisions we have made over the last couple of months, what direction we are going into with Blackbox and will lift the hood a little to show how Blackbox actually works.

We hope to see you at the meeting next Thursday, if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet you better hurry since the event is almost sold out, which was to expected considering the very good price of only € 75,- for the entire day. You can read more about our session here (dutch). If you are there, please come and roar at us Monster style!

July 3rd: Paul speaking at the 14th Adobe User Group meeting "Young Talent". Photo by Roy del Vecchio

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!