The January Meeting of the Michigan ActionScript User Group will focus on AIR Native Extensions, a new feature available for the AIR 3 runtime.  AIR Native Extensions allow you to include features that we were locked out of before for both the mobile and desktop platforms.  Some examples include interacting with the vibrator of a cell phone or the Microsoft Kinect on the desktop.

Nick Kwiatkowski will show how to use pre-existing ANE (AIR Native Extensions) to enhance your AIR projects and the basics of how they work.  We will be creating a few projects that interact with ANEs while in the meeting.

We will be meeting on Wednesday Jan 18th, 2012 in room 151 within the Communication Arts and Sciences Building on the campus of Michigan State University.  The meeting will start at 7pm.

Recording of the meeting is here : http://experts.adobeconnect.com/p6awboyfo2k/

As most of you have already realized, there have been numerous changes in the Flex world in the past few months.  After we have sat back to take them all in, we noticed that most of them will have a very positive impact for Flex developers.  Along with these changes, we will be making the following changes to our User Group in 2012 :

• The User Group will be changing its name to the Michigan ActionScript User Group.
• We will be broadening our focus of the group a bit.  While we have always covered Flex, AS3 and AIR technologies, we will also start talking more about Flash, Best Development Practices (Unit Testing, etc), Open Source projects and techniques, and other Flash related technologies.  
• We will begin meeting on Wednesday evenings, rather than Thursdays.  Tuesdays and Thursdays have become a popular evening for user groups and we don't like having to compete for people to show up.  We will still be meeting on the campus of MSU, starting at 7pm.
• We will be getting our new website online soon.  If you want to help us curate content for the new site, please let me know.