This week, I did a user group meeting on two exciting new technologies from Adobe - BrowserLab and Flash Catalyst. Briefly, BrowserLab is a new hosted service (meaning that it's an online tool hosted by Adobe) that allows you to test web pages in a variety of browsers that you may not have installed on your computer. Currently, it tests on Firefox 2 and 3 and IE 6 and 7 on XP, and Firefox 2 and 3 and Safari 3 on Mac. So as a Windows user running IE8 on Vista, I at last have a way to find out what my page looks like on IE 6 and on a Mac. Pretty cool.

Flash Catalyst is the newest tool in the Flash Platform. Catalyst allows you to take designs created in Photoshop or Illustrator and easily convert them to Flex-based Flash applications.

You can view the recording of the meeting if you want to get more information on either technology and to see my demos.

Because the Catalyst demos ended up taking longer than I had planned, we are going to continue the discussion about Catalyst at our August meeting. This session will also be recorded, and I'll post the details then.

Tomorrow night is the monthly meeting of the Sierra MMUG, the Sacramento region's Adobe user group.

This month, we'll be doing an overview of Adobe's video tools. We'll be looking at recording live video using OnLocation, editing video in Premiere Pro, editing audio in Soundbooth, adding effects in After Effects, and finally creating menus and burning a DVD in Encore.

If you'll be in the Sacramento area, please join us. If not, feel free to join us online. Details of both the location of the meeting and the URL to log in online are on the group's website.

We held the December meeting of my Adobe user group last night. I had asked the people if they wanted to do something party-ish or just have a normal presentation-based meeting, and they voted for the later, so I did a preso on using Flash, After Effects, Soundbooth and Photoshop to create an animated greeting card.

It's been a tradition of ours to encourage members to bring an unwrapped toy to the December meeting that we then donate to the Toys for Tots program. Last night, I ended up being about fifteen minutes late for my meeting (yet another time when I'm very glad to have a co-manager...) and when I did arrive, I was taken aback by my group's generosity: there was a really big stack of toys laid out a table. Not only that, but they were *nice* toys - a stack of games like Battleship and Sorry, a couple of dolls, even a fairly big playset.

So there are going to be a bunch of kids that will have a better holiday season this year thanks to the group, and as I said in the subject, it's a day that makes me proud to be associated with these folks.