PittMFug January Meeting 09
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Last Thursday I had a chance to speak at the Pittsburgh’s Flash Users Group along with Val Head. Seriously if you haven’t gone yet you should. It’s FREE and everybody that does any cool with Flash is always there.
Anyway, Val gave an excellent presentation on Phidgets. Basically you can buy a board that understands RFID stips and using an AS 3.0 framework you can program scanning applications. Very Slick. She demoed an app she wrote that scanned her microbes and other various items from her desk. It only costs about $75 to get started and some of the kits come with motors.
My presentation was about Red5 server. I’ve started a group on campus where I work called the Grid and we’re experimenting with alternative interaction devices for computers and the web. In order to use some of the devices to interact with the flash player a media server is necessary. That’s where Red5 Server comes into play.
I’m not an expert, but I showed how easy it was to get the server installed (on a mac) and up and running with some streaming apps.There are a lot of resources that come with the download, one of which is the Iron Man trailor in FLV format. Nice! There’s also fla’s the demonstrate how to itneract with the server. Unfortuneatly all the demo files are written in AS 2.0, so for fun I threw together a quick AS 3.0 streaming player. It wasn’t too hard 
In case you missed the meeting here are my slides. Hope to see you all at the next one.
