To kick off 2009, I decided to trawl my blogroll for fresh ideas.  I keep telling myself that the blogroll has too many links, but when someone posts a great idea or a new AS3 project, it pays to keep their URL around!  Some interesting clippings:

  • Mouse gesture recognition class for Actionscript 3.  If you’ve used a PDA with a stylus to jot notes down, then you have seen the way a touchscreen translates squiggly lines into recognized characters.  This class by Didier Brun does that in Flash.  I haven’t test-driven it, but Didier’s example code looks super easy to use.  If you ever want to deploy an app on a stylus-friendly platform (like a DS), this would come in handy.
  • Unity3D, a plug-in for web-based 3D games, looks sexy as hell.  Go look at that link right now if the thought of buttery-smooth 3D in the web browser fills you with longing.  You’ll notice that Unity3D is not Flash at all - and Flash will not be able to kick out these kinds of results until Adobe gets serious about hardware acceleration (or acquiring Unity3D, I guess).  Curious about performance, features, programming languages for Unity3D?  Well, let John Grden tell you all about it.  He’s actually used it.
  • Josh Tynjala over at Josh Talks Flash has released an update of his Treemap Flex component.  I always think these sorts of tree visualizers are very slick, so I slipped a copy of the Treemap code repository in my back pocket for later.
  • Loudcrowd rocks!  Yes, I’m going to shamelessly plug a web game.  I like dance music, Flash, 3D, and rhythm games.  Loudcrowd mixes all those in a big fat pot and doles out the soup of goodness that emerges.  You chat and dance with other players and listen to music - even if you aren’t playing the game you can get your favorite genre streamed to the browser tab.  Like many successful games, it’s easy to get sucked in but challenging to master.  Even with the CPU overhead of streaming audio, the keypad controls are surprisingly well-synched to the beat.  Maybe it’s not a surprise, since Loudcrowd is made by Conduit Labs.  These ass-kickers include some of the devs who drained my spare time for almost two years are responsible for Guitar Hero.  Um.

That’s all for now - happy  hacking, and Happy 2009!