Keep on the look out here and on my twitter. My twitter feed should be pretty interesting with the after parties...

If you're new to the Flash/Flex or even a well-versed developer that doesn't have a lot of connections, you need to get yourself out there and meet the interesting people of the Flash/Flex community. Join a forum, start to regularly read a flash blog and comment on the posts, go to conferences, create your own blog and showcase projects/code/experiments.

It's the best way to get your name out there.

While discussing these ideas with Tim, I had funny idea for a widget. I was thinking of an iPhone Shuffle, which would be funny to but you would need contacts in Ribbit already so I went a little further and created a random number to call. I created an array of all the US area codes and pulled one at random along with 7 other random integers. It will take a few tries before you get a good number so for a later update I'll figure out if theres a way to check the number to see if its in use or a valid number.

No style or animation yet, I just pulled code from the Ribbit code examples. I'll update it here when I add some "pizzazz." Here it is:

If you haven't heard it already. Yea, Flash Forward is going to be in San Francisco and was sold to Beau Ambur, CEO of Metaliq. Neat, so I guess no more Lynda from Lynda.com. SADFACE! She has done a great job with the conference over the years.

I hear Beau Ambur is a Microsoft Silverlight enthusiast, which is weird that he is buying a Flash/Flex oriented conference. It will be interesting to see where this is going.

Hopefully I'll be going, we shall see.

-Gregosaurus

TheFlashBlog.com - A blog that is updated on a semi-day to day basis by Lee Brimelow. He gives tips, sneak peaks, product suggestions, video interviews, and conference wrap-ups.

gotoAndLearn.com - A lovely resource that had helped me out of many jams when I was first starting out as a Flash developer. Every video tutorial is created by Lee Brimelow an includes files you to work with and follow along. Use this site to your advantage.

theFWA.com - I am sometimes surprised that a lot of people haven't heard of this site. TheFWA awards other sites for good use of interactivity and design. All the sites are Flash/Flex. Its just cool to see what other people are creating with Flash and Flex.

Google - Type into Google's Search "as3 video player". I bet you'll find some examples and tutorials right away. Don't underestimate the power of Google's Search.

flashandmath.com - Hate math? Love Flash? Well you better start loving math because it can do some crazy sh*t in Flash. Browse around for tutorials about certain equations that can help with animations, game physics, hit detections, or just some crazy experimenting you want to do.

Actionscript.org - Actionscript.org is community that helps each other out. Its got a bunch of tutorials, articles and a decent forum. Join up to start reading/writing posts. Following along with other people problems might help you avoid some of you're own, but if you find yourself stuck and no where to turn, post it here. Someone will help out eventually.

Flashkit.com - I have never been a fan of FlashKit (do to user experience) but its still huge dripping mass of Flash knowledge. I find that most of what is on there is beginner-intermediate but if you are just starting out its a damn good resource. As long as its something simple, you'll find it here.

kirupa.com - I like to think of Kirupa.com as a cleaner version of FlashKit. Again most of the tutorials here are for the beginner-intermediate but there are some advanced(not too advanced) things scattered around. Its a must better design and user experience than FlashKit.

levitated.net Levitated has a nice amount of open source examples of interaction and animation. You can download the FLA and start picking apart the code till you understand how it was done. Enjoy!

All these link I have used at some point in my career. They are all great resources but there is a chance you may not find what you are looking for. You just have to dig deeper to find what you want for or join a forum to get help. Don't hesitate to join a forum, people want to help. If you have a good resource thats not listed here, please post it in the comments.

Needless to say, I signed up right away for a developer account. I've had a ton of ideas for RIA's and widgets but I just can't fully conceptualize/prototype them due to my schedule. I showed Tim Allard the Ribbit site and API and he's really interested to get something started as well. We plan to have a brainstorm session soon, so I'm sure we'll come up with some outrageous and I'll blog about the process.

Stay tuned.