The January Meeting of the Michigan ActionScript User Group will focus on AIR Native Extensions, a new feature available for the AIR 3 runtime.  AIR Native Extensions allow you to include features that we were locked out of before for both the mobile and desktop platforms.  Some examples include interacting with the vibrator of a cell phone or the Microsoft Kinect on the desktop.

Nick Kwiatkowski will show how to use pre-existing ANE (AIR Native Extensions) to enhance your AIR projects and the basics of how they work.  We will be creating a few projects that interact with ANEs while in the meeting.

We will be meeting on Wednesday Jan 18th, 2012 in room 151 within the Communication Arts and Sciences Building on the campus of Michigan State University.  The meeting will start at 7pm.

Recording of the meeting is here : http://experts.adobeconnect.com/p6awboyfo2k/

As most of you have already realized, there have been numerous changes in the Flex world in the past few months.  After we have sat back to take them all in, we noticed that most of them will have a very positive impact for Flex developers.  Along with these changes, we will be making the following changes to our User Group in 2012 :

• The User Group will be changing its name to the Michigan ActionScript User Group.
• We will be broadening our focus of the group a bit.  While we have always covered Flex, AS3 and AIR technologies, we will also start talking more about Flash, Best Development Practices (Unit Testing, etc), Open Source projects and techniques, and other Flash related technologies.  
• We will begin meeting on Wednesday evenings, rather than Thursdays.  Tuesdays and Thursdays have become a popular evening for user groups and we don't like having to compete for people to show up.  We will still be meeting on the campus of MSU, starting at 7pm.
• We will be getting our new website online soon.  If you want to help us curate content for the new site, please let me know.

In light of Adobe's recent announcements in the past week on their restructuring and focus changes, we felt it would be best to have a meeting on the state of the Flex, Flash and Adobe world.

We will be talking about the open-sourcing of the Flex framework, the ramifications on some of the announcements of the changing product lineup and we will be giving a quick introduction on the Spoon project.

Join us in or near room 165 in the Communication Arts and Sciences building at 7:00pm on the 17th of November .  We will broadcast this meeting for those who wish to join remotely.

Join us live : http://experts.adobeconnect.com/theflexgroup/

On October 20th, Jade Freeman from Michigan State University will be preseting the Robot Legs framework.  He wil show us how to use Robot Legs to build desktop and mobile applications that integrate with Flickr and GIS applications.

The meeting will be held in room 165 within the Communication Arts and Sciences Building on the campus of Michigan State University.  The meeting will start at 7pm.

On Sept 15th, join Nicholas Kwiatkowski, leader of the Michigan Flex User Group, on an Adobe Flash Platform and hardware interactions adventure. Discover how devices like Microsoft Kinect and the Arduino prototyping board can bring Flash into the physical world. In this session, you'll learn how to integrate your Flex and Adobe AIR applications with physical hardware for an impressive combination of technologies.  This is Nick's trial-run presentation for his MAX session in October.