Here’s a screenshot of me having some fun with TileUI and 3D glasses. If you’re going to be at MAX, find me and we can all look cool together wearing 3D glasses. Attend the Papervision 3D birds of a feather session. Side note: Ben Stucki is the 3d glasses master.
Seriously, MAX is going to be ridiculous. I’m gonna get you wearing 3D glasses, flinging tiles around on a multi-touch table. This is gonna be fun.
Click the image for a larger size. You got 3d glasses?
For various reasons, which I may or may not discuss in the future, I will not be entering TileUI into the AirDerby contest.
Good luck to everyone entering the contest. My AIR app would’ve kicked your AIR app’s ass 😛
Anyone want to just give me $100,000 so I can travel the world?
The future of TileUI is a bit up in the air, so for now watch the fun videos.
I call it ShuffleBored.
You’ll need a facebook account to add it. (Note: if the link doesn’t seem to work, try logging into facebook, then click the link again)
P.S. Thanks to Juan Sanchez for suggesting the ShuffleBored name.
I’ve posted a video that shows the progress that I made during the first 12 days of working on TileUI. For about the first 2 weeks I saved a snapshot of the progress I had made (I tried to save a snapshot each day, but I missed a few). The video below is a combined video of each of these, it starts at day 1 and goes through day 12.
I stopped taking daily snapshots (and I stopped making much progress) after the first two weeks because I started working on a contracting gig. I’ve gotten much further with the software now (as the previous AIR demo video shows). But I’m not making the day to day advances like I did the first few days (man, if only I could be unemployed forever).
Here’s a quick breakdown of how things went:
Day 1: Learn Actionscript Physics Engine. By the end of the day I had a decent physics simulation running that allowed me to throw around particles. Prior to this project I had never worked with APE, it’s a solid physics engine (my only complaint is how CPU intensive it is).
Day 2: Learn PaperVision 3D. Combine PaperVision with APE. Prior to this I hadn’t played with PV3D and I figured it was about time I learn. By the end of the day I had figured out the basics of PV3D and managed to map APE particles to 3D tiles in PV3D. Damn, these libraries are good.
Day 3: I got the tiles to display images. And I got the basic selection system working where you can lasso a set of tiles and they get grouped. The group was just a messy group of tiles, but it was a start.
Day 4: Added Flickr support to load tiles straight from Flickr. Added dynamic sizing of tiles.
Day 6: Made grouping tiles put them into 3D stacks. Added double clicking tiles to do something based on the tile content, ie open larger Flickr image. (I don’t remember why I don’t have a day 5 or 8 snapshot)
Day 7: Improved Flickr support, ability to page through results, load multiple search results, etc. Added spiral stack.
Day 9: Added the menu system. Added the twist menu item to twist a stacked pile. Allowed breaking piles you made.
Day 10: Added the fan layout method.
Day 11: Added the grid layout method.
Day 12: Added the leafing layout method.
So what?
I thought this was cool because it shows a) how awesome and fast developing in Flex/AS3 is and b) how badass open source community libraries for Flex are. I was able to grab these open source libraries and within a few days have something pretty sweet to show for it. A big thanks to everyone behind the PaperVision project, and to Alec Cove for the APE engine. You guys make this stuff easy.
At last count I am using 10 different open source libraries in the TileUI project in one way or another.
Here’s a demo video of tileUI Desktop running as an AIR app. The video shows drag and drop of local files into tileUI, drag and drop photos from iPhoto, using motion detection on a webcam to take pictures, extracting contents of a zip archive and removing a subset of tiles from a stack.
Audio is kind of low, sorry about that.
I’ll be releasing more details later (as the date gets closer to Sept. 5), but I thought I’d release a little teaser of what I’ve been working for for the past week or so.
The basic idea is this:
PaperVision 3D + Actionscript Physics Engine = this, but in Flex/AIR
