My name is Joel Dart and I’m helping organize a GiveCamp here in Indianapolis.  GiveCamp is a weekend long collaboration with local developers, designers, dbas, and non profits.  Non profits have been sending in project proposals such as a simple brochure-ware website, a data collection tool, etc and then over the course of a weekend, professionals come together and do the work for them.  This is the first year for GiveCamp in Indy, so getting the word out about the event is especially difficult.

We currently have 17 project proposals from non profits, but we need about 70 more developers or we’ll have to start turning some of them down.  When looking through our signups, we noticed that we have a disproportionate representation from the Flash/Flex community, so I thought I’d reach out to be sure you guys know about this.  Indy GiveCamp is Nov 5-7 (after work on Friday and before the Colts game on Sunday) and signups are at http://www.indygivecamp.org.  If you could, please forward on this information and let your coworkers and community members know about GiveCamp.  We need all the volunteers we can get.

Thanks,
Joel

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — BlackBerry maker Research in Motion unveiled the PlayBook, a tablet computer, at a developer conference Monday.

The tablet market is so far dominated by Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and its popular iPad, but other tech companies are trying to cash in as well.

“Every successful professional has a great PlayBook,” said Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of RIM, at the BlackBerry Developer conference in San Francisco.

The PlayBook tablet features a 7-inch screen, Flash-capable video and a front and rear high-definition camera. It’s thin, at just 9.7 millimeters, and weighs 0.9 pounds. Lazaridis did not name a price.

For now, the PlayBook — which will be released in 2011 — can connect to the Internet only via Wi-Fi. RIM said it plans to offer 3G and 4G models sometime in the future.

Still, Lazaridis said RIM’s goal was “to offer an uncompromised Web experience.”

Full Article

Tuesday July 27th Meeting – 6:30PM ITT Tech

We are meeting once again this coming Tuesday July 27th @ ITT Tech in room THEORY 3.

Schedule:

1. Using the AIR 2.0 NativeProcess API to do things that AIR can’t

Andrew Westberg (www.flexjunk.com) will be discussing a consulting project he worked on that needed a multi-threaded high performance C++ application to manipulate audio in near real-time.  The client wanted to use AIR for it’s superior usability and design capabilities, but was limited by the Adobe Flash platform in other areas.  Namely, limitations in audio file format support and performance for calculation-intense applications.

2. Building Modular Applications in Flex

Sam Souhrada (www.samsouhrada.com) will be discussing the benefits of building modular flex applications. The presentation will include a general overview and construction of a small sample application. Code samples will be posted  after the presentation.

Modules let you split your application into several pieces, or modules. The main application, or shell, can dynamically load other modules that it requires, when it needs them. It does not have to load all modules when it starts, nor does it have to load any modules if the user does not interact with them. When the application no longer needs a module, it can unload the module to free up memory and resources. (From Adobe.com)

Hope to see you all there!