Fourier toy

So. Pretty.

Catch the cat

Here's a cute little Flash game that is both surprisingly solvable and surprisingly challenging.  Very bare-bones - you have a grid of circles and click them to keep a cat from escaping the grid.

It would be a good AI target, actually.  I think this may be a case where it would be interesting to explore simple semantic structures of some kind (grouping areas into some kind of cage element or something). I'm not sure.  But it would be interesting to explore.

HTML too complex?

And by HTML, I think the industry now means HTML+CSS+Canvas, as a Flash replacement. Interesting point here about "I'm too lazy to be a HTML dev" - which just means the level of abstraction is wrong.

And that's interesting.

haXe

haXe is the follow-on for the Ming SWF library; instead of compiling Actionscript, they decided just to define their own language that could then compile to SWF, Javascript, and some other stuff.

I find that a tad irritating because I'd like to have something that could compile Actionscript 3.0 into SWF for me that was open-source, but the effort itself is pretty cool and worth looking at.

Flex and Exambuff

How did I never hear of Flex? It's an application-based compiler for Flash, effectively, used for building "Rich Internet Applications" (i.e. Flash apps) without the need for a lot of the animation stuff that makes Flash so weird to use for the software designer.

[sdk] [brief article]

The reason I even ran across it is that a chap named Tim Ruffles wrote an entire site (for commenting on scanned exam papers) that he's open sourced because it just wasn't working out for him. [article] [github] [site] The actual working-with-papers part is all in Flex.

I am very strongly considering making this another target for Decl.

Boxcar2d.com: Flash GA using physics

A neat site with a Flash GA algorithm. Some thoughts.

Box2d seems to be AS v3 and thus probably not compatible with Ming. Darn. So doing this easy in Declarative seems to be out. (Update: maybe not!)

The GA is irritating. Watching this, I'm thinking that first of all, always throwing the old generation away is a mistake. You get close to a good solution then you lose it. Some ways around that would be to keep the old generation around; good solutions stay there until something manages to beat them. You could vary the mutation rate according to how stagnant the solution pool seems. A larger population than 20 might be more resilient to loss, as well.

haXe

Oooh, language design. The new haXe language compiles to SWF, Javascript, C++, NekoVM, or PHP. Now that there is cool. (And the successor to mtasc, actually.)

Of course, it manages to make everything thus look like Java, but ... there's potential there.

SWF::Declarative

Yet another interesting target for a declarative approach: Flash by way of Ming by way of CPAN's SWF module by way of a declarative wrapper. There is a truly excellent set of tutorials (using the PHP wrapper, but who cares?) here. Note that there are two entire games there as tutorials. Perl tutorials here. A Flash tutorial blog.

Flash is cool, especially now that the open-source community is getting to the point that it can deal with it. I'm particularly intrigued by the notion of being able to generate SWF on the fly like this, and being able to take a user interface that's been designed in one GUI paradigm like Wx, and translating it into a Flash environment. There are basic design principles that transfer - those are arguably part of the basic semantics of any GUI, and should be treated as such.

Man. So much to look at, so little time.

Later note: mtasc is an Actionscript compiler for library code.

Open-source Flash chart

So this open-source Flash chart component is interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, a database of useful components must be part of the semantic programming toolkit. How would one organize that?

Second, it's Flash, and open source. There's probably a boatload of useful patterns to be mined from it.