jonathan's blog
I am speaking at 360|Flex San Jose in August and you should come! 360|Flex is a great conference that really supports the Flex community. It's a great place to meet other developers (and even some designers), to learn, and to have a great time. I'll be talking about the Flex SDK source code and how to improve your development by reading it (and understanding it).
I'll be discussing the class hierarchy, the internal compositional classes, and the importance of interfaces. I will tear apart some components and offer suggestions on using them and better ways to design similar components. I will touch on the Flex component lifecycle, skinning, inheritance, custom components, list classes, and containers.
Lastly, I will discuss the Flex SDK API, how it is written today, how it will be evolving in Flex 4/Gumbo and what else Adobe needs to change! I will explain ways to use more DRY (don't repeat yourself) development practices using better componentization and compositional classes.
I plan to post some more teasers on my blog (http://jonathanbranam.net) so people who don't know who I am or what I'm talking about can get a better sense of the session and why they should (or shouldn't) come.
This is an application I built that functions as an address book, a phone using Ribbit, and a 3d Mii Editor (like on the Nintendo Wii) for the people in your address book. The address book can also load your contacts from Facebook using the "Little People" application that I wrote. The Miis are rendered in full 3d using a custom combination of Degrafa and Papervision3d.
This is the MiiCall application.
Further implementation details in the full post.
This is an implementation that brings Degrafa geometry into Papervision3d. I implemented a new Renderable in Papervision org.papervision3d.core.render.command.RenderDegrafa which transforms a set of Degrafa definitions into 3d render commands. These are located in the org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables package.These are then rendered at runtime (as vectors, not using bitmaps at all) by the org.papervision3d.materials.special.DegrafaMaterial. I also implemented an early version of the Degrafa Transformations to support various modifications of the geometry at runtime.
The demo application for both is DegrafPaper3d and Degrafa Transformations Demo. A (slightly) more beautiful example is the Mii Call demo, which uses this technology to draw the features on the Mii's faces.
Read the full post for more implementation details and the story behind this.
This post is a necessity, I guess, to claim my blog on Technorati. It would be nice if they had a method that didn't involve writing a post that goes in my RSS.
Oh, well.
Interactive Information Design Patterns for RIAs
Designing applications which convey rich information to users is difficult. We now have at our hands the ability to display massive amounts of data using rich graphics in a web browser. Unfortunately, most designs end up as a series of line charts or data grids. We need to develop and learn a new library of interactive information design patterns that facilitate a two-way conversation between users and the application.
Sorry to all who tried to register to post comments. I recently changed my domain over to http://jonathanbranam.net from http://sspeare.com and I didn't get a new reCAPTCHA key. It was denying requests from this domain. The problem should be fixed now.
I guess that's another reason to get some other form of site contact running soon. In the meantime, if you need to contact me jonathan @ this domain will work.
Sorry!
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
- Douglas Adams
Programming visuals, games, UI, HCI, software design, and language (as in the English language) have long been subjects of interest for me. Working at Cynergy Systems means that I can focus on using Adobe Flex to pursue these interests. This website is an outlet for me to share my thoughts with the Universe, whether or not you think it was a bad move to create it in the first place.