Calypso88

I'm iterating on my first test and some of the results are turning out pretty cool. The mxml is coming easier now, but I'm still pretty confounded by what's going on in the API.

For starters, trying to figure out a slider solution took me on a tour of s:Slider, s:HSlider, and finally (past mx:Slider) to mx:HSlider. I haven't kept up on the Flex news that well in the past months so I get the feeling there's some big paradigm shift that's catching me by surprise (something about shifting from the mx package to the new s package for the Spark theme?). I'm guessing that half of these classes will get culled out by launch time, so I guess that's what I get for learning on the beta.

One thing I'm excited about is how quickly you can prototype ideas in here. Getting a webcam up took all of 5 minutes, and throwing out three color pickers was instant. I did spend some time fussing with the width bindings between the slider and the palettes but in a real project I'd probably take the time to design and write a true component for that functionality so I can't complain too much.

UPDATE: This thing seems to be crashing some peoples browsers. I haven't looked into it too far but I think there are some circular references in the bindings that are getting into a loop or something (I knew that idea was too good to be true!). For now I've moved the offending swf to it's own page: enter if you dare.

With the big Flash Builder/Catalyst thing going on right now, it seemed like a good time to get myself up to speed on the Flex framework. At the moment, I'm at that stage where everything takes about six times longer to get working than if I just knocked it together in Flash. I keep getting this suspicion that Flex is just VBasic written in ActionScript with some xml in there to gum up the works, but I'm determined to stick it out. (By the way, if anyone has the link to download a copy of the langref, please let me know - waiting for the livedocs is killing me!)

So, for Flex Experiment 0.01, I recreated an old demo I wrote for a paint bucket/magic wand tool. The actual Flex components went together pretty easily - the big issue for me was deciphering which of the 1000+ components in the framework I needed to use. Once that was figured out, the real chore became negotiating the inputs and outputs of the components (s:BitmapImage takes an Object for source and doesn't output a BitmapData anywhere? Really?) - somehow it all seems to work, but the components really are black boxes that developers are not meant to get into.

Anywho - click and drag around to see it in action, and (I'll grudgingly give Flex a gold star here) right click for the source.

I was cleaning out an old work directory when I came across some experiments I built back in my AS2 days. Most of them are pretty hacky (proofs of various concepts and interactive mouse toys) but I came across an old bézier path following test. It's not very complex (or even very tricky) but it's got a zen quality and I like it. I didn't crack open the source (AS2!!!) but if anyone is dying for it, I could probably dig it up on request. Also if you're curious, the math for this lives over on my EWIKAL.

Drag the three points around to alter the path.