Cool Projects in Flex Nick Kwiatkowski Sept 10 th, 2009

Cool Projects? I’m sure you all have seen some of the cool demos that are shown that are used to “sell” Flex to others. They often include lots of different open-source frameworks that allow us to do really neat effects.

Cool Projects So, some of the cool things we will talk about here are: –The mx.graphics library that is used for drawing on the canva –The Papervision3D library used for creating applications that include 3D –AudioSpike that is used for audio manipulation.

Graphics While it /is/ kinda boring to play directly with the graphics libraries built right into the Flash player, you can make some pretty neat apps.

Graphics What’s Involved: –BitmapData : This is a representation of a bitmap in memory. You can change pixels, change colors, or do some special effects. This data can come from anything, including icons, PNG files, etc. –Bitmap : This is the object that is added to the stage to actually display the contents of the BitmapData.

Graphics What’s involved: –Mouse Events : To let us know when the user is over the Bitmap.

BUILDING THE DRAWING APP

3D Graphics One of the more popular open-source projects for demos is Papervision3D. Papervision3D allows you to take various 3D objects in space and position them within your application. –You can skin your basic elements, or import complex objects from 3D modeling apps that support COLADA (think-- AutoCAD, Maya, etc)

3D Graphics What’s involved: –Importing the Papervision3D library into your application –Setting up the basic elements of a 3D display, including a camera, viewport, scene, and renderer –Adding a cube to the screen and doing something with it!

PAPERVISION3D DEMO

Audio There are a few demo apps out there that make use of some new audio toolkits. –One of the up-and-coming toolkits is from Ben Stucki called OpenSpike

Audio AudioSpike allows you to do two things: –Use a visualizer for your audio/video streams to display the stream on the screen. Useful for audio editing. –Allows you to perform DSP functions to your audio streams (echo, etc.) What’s Involved –AudioSpike.swc – To perform DSP functions, and control volume, etc. of streams.

Audio What’s involved: –AudioVision – Allows you to tap into the spectrum analyzer and output the stream as a collection, that you can send to any graph/charting engine.

AUDIOSPIKE DEMOS

QUESTIONS?