Flashbelt’s line up of speakers, topics, and workshops is as good as any other conference you might consider flying out of town to attend.

I had to go New York a few years ago to see people like Erik Natzke, Rob Reinhardt and Jared Tarbell speak. These and many other nationally known guys will all be at Flashbelt with our home town Flash hot shots tackling both cutting edge Flash Platform topics like AIR and 3D in Flash, as well as the things you might be trying to study up on like Actionscript 3 and Game Production.

Check out the line up

I’ve been going for the last few years and it’s always been a really good time. The networking opportunity alone is invaluable. Also, plan on consuming at least $80 worth of free food and drinks.

Last time I checked, there were only 100 tickets left and you’ll be get a copy of Flash CS3 Professional Video: Studio Techniques for signing up in May. They added a new video workshop with the author of that book and I’m sure it will be popular. There are a few different pricing options.

Hope to see you there.

Check out some of what Adobe’s got planned for the next Flash Player release. Will we be able to compete with “Microsoft Sparkle” (aka Silverlight) ?

For those that like Video

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

If you still can’t decide if you want to go, there might be a few passes available for walk up pricing, but that’s $100 more.

This is going to be the best flash conference that Minneapolis has ever hosted and I’m excited to be going next week. I’m sure a few of you are too.

Judah Frangipane has worked in the web industry for the last 12 years. During that time he worked at Roxio and Parsons and is currently employed at Yellow Book. He’s been using and teaching Flash for the last five years. Judah’s worked on some Flash projects that you can see here http://www.drumbeatinsight.com

Saviz Artang has worked in technology for about 12 years. The first five
years were at Intel Corp. in CA and the rest at Thomson Corp in Eagan, MN
where he is currently holding a technology manager position. Saviz has been involved with Flash for the past two years making a toddler PC game. You can see his work at: http://artangco.com

Saviz and Judah are hoping to draw some big numbers for their first meeting as leaders on Wednesday, April 18th. They’re going to have Dustin Tauer from Easel Training demonstrating some of the exciting new features in CS3 including new features of Flash CS3, Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3 and After Effects CS3. He’ll focus on work flows between applications within the new Creative Suite.

After the presentation they’ll have a copy of CS3 for people to play around with.

(Note: there will be armed guards protecting the CS3 cds.)

As always, free pizza, beer and pop will be provided.

Also, They are taking requests for demonstration of any features or products. Feel free to post you requests to the FlashMN Yahoo Group.

If you managed to miss this somehow:

http://www.adobe.com/creativelicense/

Go ahead and Preorder today, but I don’t think they’ve made any promises about when it will actually arrive yet. I’d hope it will show up before Flashbelt.

They have gone as far as telling me my plan to upgrade a copy of Flash 5 that I bought off a guy for $40 on Craigslist and planned to upgrade to Flash CS3 will not work.

Personally I’m most intrigued by a new flash feature that attempts to make the designer to developer workflow easier by allowing us to export tweened animation in Flash as Actionscript code…

This is a quality homegrown Flash Designer/Developer’s Conference and I’d encourage anyone who interested to sign up ASAP. I went last year and learned a lot, made some great contacts and had a good time.

I actually shouldn’t publicize this because I’m really hoping I’m the only one who shows up, but he’s have a informal Flashbelt get-together between 5-8 at Brit’s Pub next Thursday 3/22/07. Please don’t come because there will be a hat there and I’m hoping my card is the only one in it.

Currently I have no site of of my own. I used to host JakeFreeberg.com off a machine at home, but that’s just a bad solution. It allowed me to play with WordPress and MovableType installs and learn a few things, I really need to put some cash down and get myself a real web host.

I’m posting here in with the hope that someone here will recommend the perfect hosting solution for my needs, which I will list below:

• It need to be affordable (None of what I plan to do with it will generate any revenue, but I am willing to sign up for a 2 year term and pay upfront if it’s a really good deal)
• I’d like to start a new WordPress Blog at Jakefreeberg.com
• I’d like to do a Drupal install with the hopes of building a site for a friend of mine who’s running for chair of an organization.
• Both of the above require PHP and MySQL databases.
• I’ve already purchased a .mn domain name for that campaign and need name server hosting to point that domain at the Drupal install.
• I’ll most likely end up hosting other domains in the future and I’d like to have the ability to host many domains within this same account.
• Knowledgeable, friendly telephone-based technical support is important
• Easy to use Tools that allow me to manage file permissions, email, domains, etc.
• I will probably end up hosting some video and audio which will require a lot of server space.

Things that I don’t care as much about:

• Bandwidth (I probably won’t be getting that many hits)
• Microsoft Server Software (I’ll avoid ASP and .Net)
• Email accounts (most people have a half dozen already, but forwarding would be nice)
• E-Commerce (If I sold anything I’d probably send people through Paypal or something)

So that’s about it.

I’m wondering who people have used, and what they’ve like and disliked about the services.

All help will be appreciated.

It truly is still a work in progress, but the new features they’ve rolled out over the last few weeks are pretty cool. They’ve now got all the RSS and probably a few other features you’d hoped to see them develop. I won’t go into detail here, but I wanted to remind everyone to go check back on their progress.

You might even find a good show to see tonight or a scope out a fun place to drink way too much beer next weekend.

If you are looking for me, I can be found here.

( sorry I decided to post to another blog I contribute to, but seems to sort of fit what we’re covering here as well )