Click here to download the components I showed at Flash Forward 2003 NY.
The Powerpoint-to-SWF convertor I use is the RoboFlash powerpoint print plugin from ehelp.com.
Throughout the next two weeks, I'll continue to post more information about the concepts, code, and demos I used during the conference, including the proximity chat and Java-enabled Lego-robot webcam. I ordered a desktop machine from cyberpowerpc.com, partially for personal projects, and partially to run flashcom applications such as the robot. However, a 24-7 robot webcam would drain the batteries and require better i/o, so I'm looking into some kind of electric-outlet adapter for the robot (any EE's out there?), and learning how to send remote calls through the IR port and the lejos RCXComm API.
If you want to learn flashcom, you should definitely check out the flashcomm mailing list. More information at http://chattyfig.figleaf.com.
I can't find my treemap source code, it must be on my external hard-drive at home. I'll try to dig up that project again (it also has a very cool rss parser/data-model API).
Treemaps are very interesting in the sense that it requires only a very simple aspect-ratio layout algorithm (I'm using the squarified layout), applied recursively to a tree data structure. Since the XML object is a tree data structure, you just recurse through that while specifying an attribute of each node to be used as the "area" of the treemap region.
Another interesting thought about Actionscript's XML object... many past projects such as my Flash-based version of iMovie require linked lists, but if you think about how the XML tree object model works, you could actually use it as an implementation of a linked list, either as a flat tree with lots of siblings, or as a single-branch tree with many depths. So some of you have asked me how to build certain kinds of FlashCom applications involving linked playlists for editable streams... the easiest way is to use the XML object as your data model. Using XML as the data model has the added benefit of a built-in serialization feature... just call toString() to describe your playlist, command list, etc., as an XML string :-)
Posted by samuel at July 17, 2003 04:52 PM