Chances are you've heard of the term or read some tutorials on how to use these diagrams to help with documenting your thought process when building a slick Flash project. I basically only wanted to share a little gem I've recently discovered but ended up writing propaganda. I digress.
I'm currently working on a project of which the source will be distributed across the globe. So I want my code to be nice and tidy and send over some HTML docs to show off. Only problem is it's a Flex project and I've been out of touch with Flex for a while. As I don't use Flex Builder, getting ASDoc to work ended up on the things-I-will-sort-out-later-pile. For this project however, it was a requirement. So no easy way out.
After a great Max in Milano, I was inspired to start playing around with Pixel Bender. Granted, I wasn't going to create a raytracer and for someone who still struggles to understand the ColorMatrixFilter I thought the outcome of this tinker is pretty useful.
A lot of people have blogged about this and there have been a few attempts at libraries which solves the problem. Some have gained status and some have gracefully failed silently. It's only recently that I encountered the need to use this method and frankly I prefer browser scrollbars as most users do in my opinion. I feel they are more responsive and have better performance. But damn it ain't easy getting this to work properly and at one point I wondered if it is actually worth the trouble.
Maybe I was born under a rock or sum'in, but I ain't heard of SOS Max before today. And boy do I have a smile on my face. How did I ever survive without it? FlashTracer is cool but I don't always want to run the browser to view my traces. It's an additional step I deem unnecessary at times. But to have an ever almighty little taskbar application running faster than the Duracel bunny at your finger tips... Phew! Now that is what I call "game".
