Society for Rich Internet Application – Rich User Interface has come up with Indian version of Flash Camp.

The agenda for the event.
Eminent expert speakers.
Check out the site to know more.
Register here.
Showcase your apps here to get cash prices.

The organisers were happy to provide 100% free passes for early birds from Kerala User Group. If any members need a pass , ping me or comment on this thread. There are only limited free passes, do let me know at the earliest to get those.

Dont miss this.

I had the privilege although accidentally, to take manage the Adobe workshop at MEC.

From Drop Box

I was informed only a couple of days prior to the event by Harish Sivaramakrishnan about the event at Model. It was a flex workshop and Adobe representation was impossible because of traveling restrictions over the Ayodhya verdict coming out that day. It was a as short a notice as it can get, so it was really hard to find people to take up the workshop. My expertise in Flex was that of a novice and I was not apt to take the workshop. After calling in a lot of favours and being denied by many, I got confirmation from Cabot Solutions. Mr. Shibu Basheer was really forthcoming and ready to provide a team of Flex experts for the event.

So i decided to take sessions on introducing the flash platform, Flex and AIR and then let the team from Cabot take the workshop. I could not create new slides and those adobe sent were not tailored to my suiting. So i decided to adapt the Key note by Ben Forta for the AFPS event. Everything went smoothly, and we did eventually run out of time. There was little issue with the flex version being dicstributed among the students and the goodies from Adobe. Goodies including Tshirts were sent by courier to my addres and it didnt reach on the date of the event. I later on delivered it to Sreedhar, the student coordinator.
Sreedhar did a wonderful job coordinating the event and also letting me have the snaps of the event.

Adobe summit was held on August 25/26 at Nimhans convention centre, bengaluru. Me and Aneesh anand represented Kerala User group for the event. These turned out to be most valuable days for me as I had the privilege of meeting many of my twitter friends and flash veterans in person.
I have tried to aggregate some presentation slides found on slide share here
The summit page has all the presentations listed here.
The official photos of the event can be checked out here.

I had reached right on time as my bus from Kochi only reached at 9 am. Thanks to Anand and Gitcy for providing accommodation where i could freshen up and reach the event venue by 9.30. An auto guy did cheat me for Rs.80 for a drive from Madiwala to Nimhans, which actually was around Rs.40.
I was amazed to find Sunil Nair, from Ahmedabad User group just standing in front of me in the registration counter queue. We formed a good team and were together for the full event.
First event was Keynote bu Ben Forta and truth be said, i was just there to see him in person. The Session was basic overview of the platform and mostly evangelism. After the session we had coffee break were we saw the long queues forming up and lots of networking happening. After this there were parallel sessions running which gave most of us difficult choices to be made. I chose Spark Internals, PixelPlay, Realtime Social games, Object oriented concepts and PaypalX for the day. I missed AIR 2.5 and realtime web sessions which could have been real useful for me. One of these sessions about social and realtime gaming got cancelled and this was real loss for the game developer in me.
Met Himanshu Mody and Yash mody from Teknopoint, the main sponsors of the event. Himanshu gave me nice goodies – RIA badge, UG manager Badge, RIA Cup and Flash class diagram posters. A big thanks to teknopoint.

Meanwhile I met Vipin chandran, Team from Impelsys, Aneesh and team from Amrita, Muhammed Khan, Mrinal Wadwa, Saurabh Mathur, Harish sivaramakrishnan, Saurabh Narula, Mariam DH- The great game dev I was really looking forward to meet, Arul Kumaran from Singapore UG and many more. Great thing was meeting the 3 musketeers from RIA RUI via Prabhakaran.
I went ahead to check the device demos at the Adobe stall. I was really happy to see Csharks flash site loading easily on a nexus one.

Food at noon was excellent and i did skip one session time to communicate with all the people who had come for the event. Me and Aneesh tried for the Intel App-up key chain but lost.

Day 2 was basically for designers and yet more developers turned out.

From Drop Box

All the three keynotes were good ones and we got to know more about the sponsors and companies who put up the stalls for the event. I found iPlotz team as a sponsor for the event and felt happy to see a team from Kerala making it big. I chose Visual experiences with Flex, mobile design considerations, Multiscreen design, Less verbose AS3 and passion driven development sessions for the day. I really missed out on Brain power and Interaction do’s and don’ts which were both rocking sessions.

I could relate to whats Arul was talking in both of his sessions and passion driven development felt heartfelt. At the end of the day I had to rush back to catch my bus back to Kochi, but I was certainly a satisfied man. More than the sessions, the opportunity to meet these great people was well worth every effort. Congratulations to the Adobe Team and Saltmach for this wonderful experience. After the event I got the Tshirt, certificates and Adobe branded watch I also came across one of my seniors from college days representing TCS as they were one of the sponsors for the event.
Write up on IGDS event at same venue

From Kadug

Gods own developers usergroup successfully organised the first ever Adobe launch event in Kerala. It was the launch of Flex 4, Flash Builder, Cold Fusion Builder and Flash Catalyst. The event took place at Woods Manor Hotel Conference Hall on April 10 which included sessions for the full day with food and snacks.

Behind the scenes.

I had attended the IGDS event at Bengaluru for which Adobe was a sponsor. For the event i got a chance to spent some time with the Adobe team at their booth and met Harish Sivaramakrishnan, Hemant, Ramesh and others. Harish was really interested in conducting an event in Kerala and told me to go ahead with organising a launch event. It was Harish who was the mentor and support all along.

Back home I communicated with some of our active member and co manager Jerry Don and got great response from them. Musavir, Thazleem, Ajith Manmadhan and Jerry made themselves available for multiples meetings for planning and execution. Each one of them were busy with their work and yet were available online for collaborating live. A big thanks to google docs, gtalk, google groups and gmail without which this would have stayed a dream.

We were not sure if to conduct the event for students at an educational institution premises or for techies at a hotel conference hall. Ultimately we decided to try and push the event for techies. This was really a tough job as we needed to confirm atleast 50 attendees and we had only 10 days to confirm that. Also we needed a sponsor other than Adobe and get a good conference hall booked. Toobler helped a lot with the registration page designs and we used wordpress plugins by Binny VA for event registration. I am more than happy to say that we got 80 plus registrations within a short time. We had to restrict to 50 people as we had booked a conference hall which cost Rs 300 per person as food was planned.

Musavir for sponsorship from Bridge India at the nick of time and everything afterwards became so easy. Hugo Messer, Bridge CEO was really helpful and supportive of the venture. Bridge were also trying to promote their open coffee event which again was an event aiming for social gathering of techies.

We received Tshirts and some gift checks from Adobe before the event. I also ordered half yearly Adobe swag for the user group and we successfully distributed those on the event. Bridge also provided their sponsorship before the event and we were all set. We had a hard time getting the right venue as many of the available Hotels had their conference halls booked as it was year end time. Toobler helped out here too as they had their client visiting and we bought a combo package from Woods manor at a good price.

Musavir was the one incharge of getting the flex banners printed and he did so exceptionally well which again was extremely economical too. Also for the event we had Thazleem buy the gifts for the speakers and others helped pack those. We also had help fro one of our active members with taking photos of the event as well.

Harish himself came as the special guest from Adobe, even when he was extremely busy with all the events he had to attend. He took total control of the event and his presence itself gave a new level to the whole event. We hope he will be continuing his support for KADUG and we hope to make more events. Vipin Chandran, Flash/Flex expert from Impelsys came down to take special session. He told the audience how ActionScript 3 is an extremely powerful tool and how it can be used for just about anything. We cant thank him or Harish enough for what it meant for our UG.

Other sessions were handled by Me and Thazleem which actually covered Photoshop CS5, Flash CS5 sneakpeaks and ColdFusion Builder overview. Diana Kulke from Bridge enlightened the crowd on Open coffee event which many of the attendees attended a few days after wards.

All together it was a wonderful team effort culminating an very successful event with more than 55 people attending. Every one were happy even when they came from different walks of life and were professionally working in different techs. All had something to take home from the event and we hope we will continue this legacy.

Official report will follow in another posts

This is the press release for the upcoming event on April 10 Saturday at Woods Manor, Kochi.

The Kerala Adobe user group in association with Bridge, India will conduct a launch event for Adobe’s latest product and technology releases at Hotel Woods Manor, Cochin on April 10. The products and technologies in focus includes the Flash builder 4, Flex 4, ColdFusion builder and the soon to be released Adobe CS5 software suite, which includes Adobe’s flagship product, the Adobe Photoshop. The details are available on http://godsowndevelopers.com/kad/launchevent/

The limited seats event is completely free with sessions on all the Adobe’s latest technologies and products. Speakers at the event include Mr.Harish Sivaramakrishnan, Adobe evangelist who will speak about the Flash Builder 4 and the Flash Catalyst and other experts. Food and refreshments will be made available to all participants for free. The event will also mark the first time that Cochin is included as a destination in its worldwide promotional tour by the software giant, another mark of Cochin’s rising superpower status in the IT world.

Though the event is mainly targeted at developers and designers, the event is planned to be helpful to entrepreneurs and business persons as well with networking session to meet and interact with fellow entrepreneurs and developers. Entrepreneurs can also find out how to benefit from these new software wonders by Adobe. There will also be many contests and even more prizes. Interested persons can register for the event by logging onto http://godsowndevelopers.com/kad/adobe-launch-registration/, the official website of the Kerala Adobe user group, God’s own developers.

Make use of this wonderful opportunity.

Thanks to Bridge, Toobler, Csharks, UST Global

February 19th 2010 marks the 20th Anniversary of Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe is getting together with the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) to celebrate the anniversary of the software that changed the face of photography and design forever.

The Photoshop 20th anniversary celebration on February 18th at 7:30 p.m. pst will be streamed LIVE and feature Photoshop luminaries including NAPP’s Scott Kelby, John Loiacono, Adobe Senior Vice President and General Manager, Creative Solutions Business Unit, NAPP Photoshop gurus Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski, Adobe Photoshop star Russell Brown, and other key members of the Adobe Photoshop team. This fun-filled night will feature a walk through Photoshop history, a glimpse into the future, and celebrates all things Photoshop.

It’s easy to attend! Sign up at http://www.photoshopuser.com/photoshop20th, and come back to that page on February 18th at 7:30 p.m. pst for an amazing history-making night.

Who knew this software that revolutionised graphics editing and photo touching was this old

We had a very successful user group meeting at Oberon mall on 12th Dec 2009. Being the first meeting it was conducted on an unofficial manner in order to measure the attendance and support of the members and as a bench mark to plan ahead for future meetups.

From Adibe User Group meet 12th Dec 09

I would be entirely grateful to Mr. Vipin Chandran and all the members of Toobler for making the event a success. Majority attendees were from toobler under the guidance of Jerry and Bobbin. We had SEO specialists, PHP expert, Artists (award winning at that), cold fusion expert, Flex and flash developers.

From Adibe User Group meet 12th Dec 09

We started off when the team from toobler reached us. We were joined by Musavir and couple of others later on. We had general discussions, introductions and the distribution of the Adobe goodies. We venue was not exactly suitable for open discussions as there was this music going on. Yet once vipin joined us things heated up as he took everything into control with expert views and opinions from his vast experience with Adobe software.

From Adibe User Group meet 12th Dec 09

Later on we decided to have a stand up talk anchored by Vipin where we had some discussions on web services, flex 4, Cold fusion Builder etc. He advised on how to move forward with the group and gave some valid points regarding other User groups and meeting which he had known in his 9+ years of industrial experience.

From Adibe User Group meet 12th Dec 09

We all had a lot to learn from the bits of info he was sharing. He also told the team about planning the next meeting more officially with dedicated sessions and support infrastructure. Later on we planned about spreading awareness about the user group among other IT companies and institutions and taking it to the next level in 2010. We have decided to conduct next UG meet in Kochi itself at a more dedicated meeting space with projectors and sessions. All those who missed out on this one are welcome to join up and be active in strengthening the activities and spreading the news.

Special thanks to all those who attended

Guys as we have started discussing on the forums, we need a good logo for godsowndevelopers.com, the user group of keralas designers and developers. Original price was an Adobe branded swag notebook, but i just got it confirmed from Adobe that they will be happy to give away an Adobe Photoshop license to the winner. So what are you waiting for? Get to designing! Whatever inspires you, art or travel, blogging or http://www.partycasino.com/ gaming, we would like to see what you come up with. We look forward to seeing your most creative and innovative work. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask! The criteria for the contest is

* you should be from kerala
* should be a member of KAD and godsowndevelopers.com
* logo should be themed for our god user group.
* logo should be submitted on or before dec 25. [Submissions completed]
* submission can be done through links posted as forums posts at KAD or godsowndevelopers.com or can be sent to admin[at]godsowndevelopers.com

Abhilash’s first design won the contest. Congrats to him on stealing the Photoshop CS4 license

Designs by Abhilash
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Designs by Musavvir
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Design by Abhilash CV
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Designs by Biju Louis
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Designs by Naveen
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Design by Kailas
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Another Design by Musavvir
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We have some entries after the poll started. Adding those here, although not eligible for competition.
Design by Anand