Romain Guy and I will be returning to JavaOne this year to give another talk this year. We thought about presenting on horticulture, or the effect of air travel on the Amazon rain forest, but in the end we decided at random to talk about this topic: Filthy Rich Clients: Filthier, Richer, Clientier.

In trying to figure out the wacky results I was seeing from running the BubbleMark application, I discovered that timer events are constrained in Flash (and therefore Flex) when running inside the browser. This limitation extends to all methods of timing, including: the Timer class, handling ENTER_FRAME events, and manually calling callLater().

In the Top Drawer application that I posted recently, wanted a custom combobox that showed the line widths as graphical lines, not as text descriptions. Text is a pale substitute for graphics, don't you think? Think how much more boring Hamlet would have been if it had just been a bunch of words. Or Anna Karenina. Or think how exciting and immersive everey episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants is, all because it's drawn in such meticulous detail.

Today, we finish our walkthrough of the Top Drawer application. But first: Q: Why did the Shape leave the canvas? A: It had had its fill. Q: What do they call boxing matches between vector-art objects? A: Stick-fighting. Q: Why don't Shape parents allow their kids to watch stick fighting? A: Too much graphic violence. Q: How are Shapes kept informed? A: First, they're given an outline, then they're filled in completely. Q: Why was the drawing application so tired?

Q: Why do graphics geeks write vector art applications? A: We're just drawn to it. Q: Why couldn't the blank canvas get a date? A: He didn't have any good lines. Q: Why did the rectangle go to the hospital? A: Because it had a stroke. Q: Why is TopDrawer sluggish when the canvas is empty? A: Because it's out of Shapes. Welcome to the second installment of TopDrawer, a series in which I describe how a simple vector-drawing application was implemented in Flex.

I spent last week at the Java Posse Roundup conference, where I gave a 5-minute "lighting talk" entitled "Filthy Rich [Flex] Clients." The video is posted on YouTube, along with other videos of lighting talks from the conference, but I'll embed it here as well: The quality isn't really up to the task of showing how the code actually works (I'll blithely blame the video quality, and hope that the problem is not with the speaker). But I thought I'd post the video as a teaser for future articles.

As part of my learning the Flex platform, I plan to write some sample Flex applications to see how various things work in the system. In particular, I want to play around with MXML, ActionScript3, Flex components, Flash APIs, and general UI and graphics functionality in the platform. And I definitely want to play around with filter effects, states, and transitions, of course; I find them very moving. To begin with, I wrote a simple vector drawing application. There's not enough of them out there, right?

A comment on my previous posting asked for some explanation of what Flex is and how it relates to Flash. I'm still intending on posting some technical content here and going over some sample code, but hey - I'm Flexible.I was sort of assuming that everyone had heard of Flex and knew something about it. But since I'm new to the platform myself, and since I intend this blog to be for relative newcomers to the platform (at least for now, since that's where I'm at), it seems reasonable to define some terms.

Adobe released a bunch of good stuff yesterday. It's pretty huge. Not mentioning it would be like forgetting to tell your wife you like her new haircut; tactless and just plain dumb. Adobe AIR 1.0: Bringing Flex, web programming, and Rich Internet Applications in general to the desktop.Flex 3: The latest release of the Flex platform, a powerful GUI toolkit sitting on top of the rich Flash rendering engine.

I know what the world needs - another weblog! There's surely not enough of them out there already... Welcome to my new weblog, Codedependent (a term which comes from this joke on my humor blog). I intend to use this blog for random discussions of graphics software; demos, tutorials, how-tos, snippets, announcements, algorithms, whatever. I'm also not above the odd humor piece or two (which can be even funnier when people take it seriously, despite my best efforts to be completely ridiculous).