At last night's meeting I described Kenny Bunch of Dreamsocket as having a larger brain than the rest of us. His response was "Well, I don't know about that." Then he proved that, even if his brain isn't larger, it certainly has a lot more knowledge in it than most people when it comes to delivering content on the Web. Kenny walked us through the ins and outs of delivering slide shows, audio and video (and any combination of those) to the Web, and then showed us how he's helped CBS, Disney, Cartoon Network, and CNN coordinate media delivery, bandwidth management and advertisement insertion.

Kenny has been working in technology for more than 20 years and has been working with these media giants for the past seven years. His work with the Cartoon Network's Ben10 PS3 game that he demoed at our meeting has earned him a seat at an interactive video panel at this year's NAB conference. Kenny is always a big draw for our user group and I am happy to say that he attends the group regularly, making the group that much better.

Although the focus of the meeting was media application, Kenny was also giving us a glimpse into something that makes media applications easier to build and maintain: the Dreamsocket Media Framework. Kenny built this framework over the last few years to make it easier to provide the depth of support that his clients have required. The Dreamsocket Media Framework was released last month, but Kenny is trying to find a way to make it possible for the framework to be freely licensed for non-commercial work. We'll let Kenny announce his licensing plan when he finds the right licensing solution for everyone.

At our next meeting on Tuesday, March 24 we have another advanced topic as Andrew Westberg from Simplified Logic will be discussing "Digital Rights Management and the Flash Platform." We hope that you will join us.

I wanted to post an entry about last night's meeting featuring Ryan Taylor from Schematic to recap the event. Ryan's presentation on his Animation System was excellent and I believe that everyone at the meeting got a lot out of the session.

Ryan began the presentation explaining the differences between timeline and programmatic animation, showing the advantages and disadvantages to both. Then Ryan went into the math of animating, which quite honestly is the most math I've endured since high school (and that was a long time ago). I was truly impressed with Ryan's confidence and knowledge when it comes to programmatic animation. He really understands what makes an animation work and relayed that to the audience well.

Finally, after getting us the background that we needed to understand what his Animation System offered, Ryan demonstrated the many things that you can do with very few lines of code. Built in ActionScript 3.0, Ryan's Animation System can use either the Enter Frame Event or a Timer to control animations. I loved seeing that you can write one line of code to animate an on-screen object in ways that would normally take many, many more lines. By the end of his demonstrations I could clearly see the time and money that can be saved using this system. Finally, Ryan showed showed the presentation that John Grden used at MAX last week that combined PaperVision3D with Ryan's Animation System. It was very interesting.

Ryan's Animation System is currently at v2.0 and can be found here. Ryan said that the system has an MIT License and developers may do what they want with the code. Ryan has also gone to to trouble of documenting the system and providing all of the demonstration files within the code download.

Thanks, Ryan, not only for presenting but for giving back to the community.

Jason Jacobs, a recruiter for firstPRO, has a job opening in Buckhead that he describes this way:

Salary: 100-110k
Location: Buckhead

• Flash 8/CS3
• Flash Communication Server/Flash Media Server
• Flash Video delivery
• ActionScript 2.0 OOP architectures
• Flash Remoting
• Javascript/Flash Integration

If you are interested in this position, have your resume ready and contact him at 404-257-7329 or at j.jacobs@firstproinc.com