Join LAdobe on Thursday night, January 28th at 7pm at our new location at Key Code Media at 1004 Santa Monica Blvd. in Santa Monica. Yes, after almost 4 years we finally have a permanent location on the Westside! Key Code Media is dedicated to supporting the User Group community and as a result we can have meeting at both their Santa Monica as well as their Burbank location from now on. Parking is available on the street for free after 6pm. Remember, all LAdobe events and meetings are always free to attend with no RSVP required.
For our first meeting of 2010, we’re launching a new initiative. With our new location in a new decade, LAdobe wants more new speakers and presenters than ever before. We know a lot of our members would love to share their advice with their fellow peers but are always afraid of presenting due to anything from stage fright to thinking they have talk for an hour to not getting anything in return.
To that end, we’ve launched a new feature called the Lightning Round. At the beginning of each of our meeting, we’ll have as many as four members who’ll share their Adobe application tips with our audience. The presentation can be on anything. From Photoshop to Illustrator to Flash to Dreamweaver and Soundbooth to After Effects. Even legacy apps like Director or Freehand. Anything is fair game. You can even choose to present that night if our lineup isn’t already full. And you only need five minutes minimum for your presentation! No PowerPoint slides, no fancy visual effects. Just anywhere from 5-20 minutes will do it. Best of all, each of our presenters will be able to choose a prize from our monthly stash before we open up the prizes to the regular drawing. So how would you like to come to an LAdobe meeting and actually be guaranteed to win something and something you probably want! The only exception to this is large prizes like conference admissions or expensive software. But all books, clothing and all other swag are fair game. And you know by now that LAdobe has one of the best libraries of books out there in SoCal! So if you’d like to present this month, or any month (special events like MiniMAX or an Adobe speaker tour excluded), please contact LAdobe with your idea so we can promote it in advance and that you get guaranteed to present on the 28th.
From there, we’ll revisit a topic we first covered over 2 years ago. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It powers a lot of the most popular websites today and you see it’s effects everywhere from drop-down menu to photo galleries to slideshow and data grids. Many people say it will replace Flash as it does a lot of the same things but it native to most web browsers, it’s visible in most cases on the iPhone and other smartphones and mobile devices and it’s much more friendly to search engines. Adobe has had its’ own AJAX framework called Spry for many years but has been depreciated over time due to a lack of development at Adobe Labs. It’s still very useful though and there are now other frameworks that have free components for Dreamweaver available for download at the Adobe Dreamweaver Exchange.
For this presentation, our user group manager, Adam Bell of dataTV, will start by revisiting Spry and then showcasing the components for JQuery, Yahoo’s YUI and Mootools that all work inside of Dreamweaver. While these components are not as flexible as Spry is, he’ll show you how you can make them work and create dynamic presentations using Dreamweaver in a data-driven webpage.
We’ll have a number of Web Design and Photoshop books to give away from all our major publishing sponsors and free food and beverages from Key Code Media and Function. So we hope to see you on our return to the Westside at Key Code Media on the 28th!
For our May meeting we’ll be continuing the celebration of the launch of 
