Well my post for this month was going to be a tutorial on customising Flash UI components, but unfortunately doing it properly is going to take more time than I have available to me at the moment so I’m just going to keep working on that in the background and will post it when it’s ready.  In the meantime I’m going to put up more information about some of my Open Source projects and hopefully get them better known, which in turns should, I hope, accomplish one of the aims of this blog.  Getting people to help improve my stuff and, by proxy, improving my skills and knowledge.

So first up, purely by virtue of being my most recent, is Easel, a colour (I’m english, so yes it is spelt right!) manipulation library for Actionscript 3.  Easel came about from a need to take a randomly generated colour and get colours that would work well with it for dynamically generated objects in a recent project at work.  At first I just managed to find the Tint library by RevokeLabs which provided me with a darken function which did the trick for me.  However I then needed more, so I managed to find an algorithm to calculate the complementary colour on a forum somewhere, which I’m afraid I can’t remember, but have subsequently replaced so I don’t feel too bad about not crediting it.  From there I had the idea of replicating the colour manipulation functions of Sass, which I’d read about in a recent .Net tutorial, but hadn’t had a chance to play around with (I have now and will no doubt be writing more about this down the line, watch this space!).

I was struggling to find the algorithms to accomplish what I needed in AS3 so I ended up pulling the source for Sass from GitHub and wading through that to find what I needed.  I then proceeded to rewrite the functions to AS3 which involved rewriting the original manipulation functions from the Tint library as they relied on manipulating the RGB values whereas Sass was working with the HSL.  I did however keep the getHex and getRGB functions as there seemed to be no real difference in them.  The upside to this approach was that I learnt a bit about colour manipulations, and got more experience with Ruby code, always a good thing!

Please check out the link below or on the right for the project page which contains links to the GitHub source and the Demo.

Easel

Ok, so one of my goals for this year is to really start getting involved more in the coding community.  That is the whole intention of this blog, to try and share my learning experiences and provide a home for the various projects I’m working on in my own time in the hope that other people will find them useful.  There is also the hope that more knowledgeable and more skilled folk than myself might catch wind and offer advice and help to myself.

In actual fact this goal was something I set myself towards the end of last year, which is when I first started setting up this blog, but I never seemed to find time to actually kick it off.  I guess that’s what New Year’s resolutions are all about, making you take that step.  So here goes, the blog is now officially live, and you are now, hopefully, reading the inaugural post.

I’m going to try and post as often as possible on here, probably monthly at the moment until I find enough to write about more often.  I’ll also be gradually adding pages and links for my various open source playground projects, so I’ll undoubtedly be posting to launch them and keep you all updated on their progress.

Here’s to 2011

Will