I just got back from the RIAdventure cruise and WOW, what an awesome time! This was the only conference I’ve been to where both the speakers and attendees were all top-notch. Being locked on a cruise ship in the Caribbean for 7 days with these guys was an incredible experience. And I never heard the words, “no, I don’t want to discuss work topics, we’re on vacation!”
On the last day, I filled in for Sam Rivello, who was recovering from a drunken leap off the ship’s main staircase. I threw together a demo of the Particle Emitter Publishing Tool I blogged about a few weeks ago, and showed how easy it is to implement a TweensyFX particle emitter in your app (either through MXML or Actionscript, your choice). A few of the Tweensy classes use constructor injection (they require parameters in the constructor), which isn’t compatible with MXML, so I extended and used the subclasses for MXML instead. Hopefully when Tweensy gets to 1.0, all the constructor injection will be stripped out, as setter injection is usually more efficient anyway.
When I presented this, I got some really great feedback about ways to make it better. I know that I’ve got to work on the interface, as it’s not very intuitive and is difficult to navigate. A great idea that Josh Cyr suggested is a publishing community, where people can submit, rate, and comment on different FX. I envision something similar to Adobe Kuler, or the Flex 3 Regexp Explorer.
Here’s the demo, and here’s the source. The SWF Profiler in the demo overrides the right-click “View Source” option, so sorry about that. Here’s the EmitterCanvas I used to render Emitters and IEffects to one BitmapLayer.
Tags: doug mccune, Flex 360, greg burch, john wilker, josh cyr, nate beck, RIAdventure
