In July, I attended the Austin Flash User Group monthly meeting. About 20 people were in attendance, a mix of designers who have never used Flash to hardcore Flash enthusiasts. I met a lot of great people and enjoyed hearing about interesting projects at different companies.

Unfortunately, the Flash User Group has been lacking in leadership and low attendance. There wasn’t much substance to the meeting when it came to Adobe Flash. I’m usually really good a complaining when something isn’t right, much better than actively participating to fix it! Frankly, I’m tired of playing that card. Feeling it was time to jump in feet first, I volunteered to do my own presentation to the group and host the next meeting at Springbox. I had no idea what I got myself into.

I decided to speak about HTML5 and Flash. This topic interests me mainly because of the hype generated by Steve Jobs and his refusal to allow Flash on the iDevice. I thought this would be a good topic for the Flash community since a lot of people, like me, are concerned about how this might change the future of Flash.

Last night was the presentation. The attendance was a record-breaking 45! I say record-breaking, but really I have no idea. It was definitely more people than usual. We started out with my presentation about HTML5 and Flash. Next up was Steve Shipman, an employee at Motive, who gave a talk about a Flash code library he created for face detection. Very cool stuff! Overall, the meeting was a huge success. I met a lot of people who work in Flash as a full-time job. Everyone is hungry for a local community in which they can participate and share knowledge. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for anything more out of the meeting. As a user group, we’re on our way to rebuilding a strong sense of community in Austin, and I’m sure in the future the meetings will get even bigger and better.