Are you amazed at the Flick book, or the fact that its in Flex?

We’ve been doing this in Flash for years (i.e. 2004).

http://www.iparigrafika.hu/pageflip/

The second example with the medical images has absolutely no reason to be using Flex as far as I can see. Just got the overhead of the framework when it’s not required.

@Tink, Nope, I’d never seen that PageFlip demo you have above. I’ve seen things like that but not as interactive. Very nice work, especially considering the time period it was developed in. Kudos. My guess is that very few people at 360Flex have seen it either.

Sure, the Flex framework overhead is nothing to sneeze at but it will also run smoother since AS3 is so much faster. Also, I’m just guessing here but I’ll bet that Ely’s version is easier for the developer to drop into an app and populate. That’s just the nature of Flex.

Yeah but we don’t have to use Flex to use AS 3.0 (i.e. AS 3.0 projects and the Flash CS3 just round the corner).

There’s really no reason why it can’t be as easy to use in AS 3.0 as it would be with Flex i.e. you add children to it, and internally it loops through the child array adding each child in the correct position.

I’m not putting down the work Ely is doing, just that we’ve been doing it for a while, and there’s so many sites out there that have been using the flip book for years. I’m also seeing a lot of stuff being done in Flex recently, when there really is no need for it (which was one of the things everyone was stating would be a bad thing to do when Flex 2.0 was released).

One of the things Ely work is doing, is showing devs from other platforms, what the Flash platform is capable of (not specifically Flex), which is a great thing!

Don’t get me wrong, the component looks good. But turning pages has been done in Flash so many times before. I think there’s a Flash component on flashcomponents.net

ha,ha I didn’t hit send and I left the machine and Tink had replied what I was already thinking.

:D

Don’t worry, Tink doesn’t like anything. :)

@cisnky/keith
You guys are hilarious.

@Tink, you know. I just assumed that if I create an AS3 project in Flex that it would give me exactly the same thing as if I created the same thing in Flash9 Alpha. Humm, I’ll check that out this weekend and post it.

Definitely not safe for work:
http://www.monkeymag.co.uk

George did an amazing job with the page flip transition for the magazine engine. (Flash 8; pages during the transition are actually bitmap snapshots of the content.)

Not entirely sure what Flex added to this (it looks like it would have worked identically as an AS3 project without the overhead.)

Very impressive implementation, in any case. Love the transparent pages.

(By the way, your captcha didn’t work for me in Safari.)

@Aral, at first I was thinking “dude, what are you posting this URL on my site for? How is this relevant?” But then I saw the flipBook and got it.” That’s what I call a great user experience in Flash!

I think the most impressive part of that demo was the Apollo app he built. In this app he loaded the WebKit browser object in each page and proceeded to google different subject while turning pages. Seeing a browser page flipping like that was definitely a first!

Yes, not thanks to Flex framework, but thanks to Apollo!

@Tomas, damn, you’re right. I had forgotten about that part. I don’t think Aral, Tink and Peter have seen that yet. I hope Ely posts that when Apollo Beta is out.

The transperency feature in this app. is wrong!!! You are just seeing one side of a page which is transparent when you look it towards or backwards!

And i also think like “tink” because it is not a new stuff for a flash developer. Nothing special. May be it can be easy by using a component but it is not special.

Regards

[...] Then there’s Ely Greenfield. Apart from landing the better than a Lego Vagina award he was a superb speaker. His presentation on Making Components was full of very technical information but he distilled it down into an understandable form. He knew his material and how long it would take to get through his presentation. I’m sure everyone left with a much deeper understanding for making their own components. [...]

Wow, I would have never thought that I would get so much resistance to offering kudos to someone for their Flash work. But, I’m going to stand by my award here. I was in the room and it got the biggest round of applause during the conference. Plus, afterwards when people were talking in the lobby it was common to here comments like, “Did you see Ely’s book? . . . Wow that was impressive.”

Of course the person(s) who did it first deserve all the credit in the world. No doubt about that.

“I just assumed that if I create an AS3 project in Flex that it would give me exactly the same thing as if I created the same thing in Flash9 Alpha.”

No, one is a fully released product, one is a very early alpha of a product. In fact I never expect them to do exactly the same thing.

Yes, we all know turning pages is not rocket science.

The point was it is to a room full of Flex developers, it really was. Lets just be honest here, most are coming from a non fun UI world, that is EXACTLY what makes Adobe ahead of the pack in terms of RIA development.

Adobe is really growing up and AS3/Flex 2 is the first real step in that direction.

The effect also worked for a working mid-stream video player, which I have yet to see on any flash page turners. Not saying that it has been done, I’m just saying it was very cool to watch.

Wow! Lots of good discussion here.

First of all, thanks for the…um….award? I have a place on my mantle that will be perfect for a … um…Lego Vagina? What does the award look like?

And to what Tink and others have posted…of course, they are absolutely right. The flip-book effect has been around in flash for years…If you go look at the page of samples I posted, you’ll see the link to the original (? not sure if there were earlier implementations) flash flip-book that I used as inspiration.

Does flex add anything to the effect? yes and no. Technically, flex is flash…anything you can do in a flex application, you can do in a flash-authoring project too. So Tink, and others, are right, that rebuliding the flip-book as a flex component doesn’t _technically_ allow anything that wasn’t possible in Flash. In the same way that anything you can do in C++, you can do in assembly. And anything you can do in HTML, you can do with a blank HTML page and a whole lot of javascript. But there are a lot of people out there who used C++ (and still do) who weren’t interested in delving into the depths of assembly, and lots of people who want to save time by describing a web page declaratively through HTML rather than building it line by line from Javascript. In the same way, there are many developers out there who would love to (and would pay to!) take advantage of the incredible visual abilities flash has to offer, without having the time or the skillset to dive deep into the traditional flash authoring workflow.

Flex has a different design center than flash, and makes some things easier and some things harder(?) Actually, I don’t really think the technology makes anything harder…except, perhaps, publishing tiny SWFs. The functionality the Flex SDK provides is pretty additive to what the core player API gives you, so I do believe (and have made it a bit of a mission to evangalize the fact that ) anything you can do in flash, you can also do in flex. But certainly the lack of tooling support for things like drawing and timeline animations makes some things more difficult.

But I think publishing a flex component version of the flip-book, and a whole bunch of other techniques from flash’s storied history does in fact add huge value. There’s a lot of incredibly talented individuals out there who know how to create amazing visual effects in actionscript. There’s a whole lot more incredibly talented developers out there who really do not have the skill-set to create those effects, but would really like to use them in their flex applications. Flex’s component model, framework, styling and skining system, templating and item renderers, and most importantly, MXML — the glue that brings it all together — are explicitly built around the idea of code reuse…around the idea that fantastic experiences can result from a collaboration between left brain developers and right brain designers (and cross-brain dev-igners).

So, by all means, full credit where credit is due…to the community of talented flash developers and designers who have spent years creating amazing visual and interactive effects with the flash platform. But let’s recognize the opportunities that exist (including financial…I give my work away free as an evangalism effort, but I believe talented flash dev-igners could make good money selling their services into the flex community) for all of us if the flash community considers bringing some of that creativity to bear on the growing flex ecosystem.

But I really do appreciate the award :)

Ely Greenfield
Flex SDK team.

[...] There’s been an interesting little discussion going on in the comments of this blog post on PolyGeek about the FlexBook component — mostly pointing out the relationship between this component and the previous flash-authoring based versions, and questioning what value Flex is adding to the effect. [...]

I like how such interfaces are now encapsulated in a parameterizable component, which anyone can customize through simple XML.

It’s not a new enduser experience, true, but it’s a very different development experience. That’s the key point…?

jd/adobe

@Ely and jd,

Well said to both of you.

I love the _drag, drop, next_ experience of working in Flex – actually it’s _drag, drop, databind, next_ but still, very quick and easy to do. To me that’s the big difference between Flex and Flash.

@Ely, great analogy with C++/assembly, etc.

It will be interesting to see how the market changes with the popularity of Flex and soon Apollo. Obviously there will be a lot of work done to bring pre-Flex components, effects, what-have-you into the Flex world just as Ely has done with the flipbook. And I hope that everyone in the community has a lot of fun and makes a ton of money doing it.

I thought Ely’s talk at 360Flex was fantastic. For your readers who were not there I hope to add a bit of context. The talk was a dense and robust discussion on building custom components in Flex. Ely spent one hour and twenty minutes showing how to build a component (which was not the flip book). The Flex Book demo was very near the end and it proved to be a “Star Search Moment.” I am a Flash developer and I have used the flip book technique in a project before. His first example I thought “cool, it is a flex component”, then the transparency version I thought “wow, nice idea”, then the google search page flip example in Apollo brought the house down. You can’t do that in Flash methinks. It was the perfect ending to a excellent talk.

@Randy, great recap. Thanks.

Tink, sorry, but I believe that Perfect Fools was the first ones who made the Flash Book — they had it complete and online no later than Apr, 05 2002.

Their flash book had the fixed angle and was not so advanced as yours — but it worked good (and had the basic transparency support) (I’ve been insipred by their work and even made my own version in 2002).

Ely made good work, one thing I especially love in his implemetation is styles applied to the book in very simple way.

Hey check this guy out. He actually has made a release on this with no credit to anyone.
http://www.rubenswieringa.com/blog/flex-book-component-alpha#comment-479

Ely does give credit and this guy just states boldy that he built it from the ground up. What a thief

@Mike, it’s possible that he did it from the ground up. In that case my only criticism would be, “Dude, it’s been done. Pick something else.” Either way, it’s a worthy effort.

Hey, thanks for backing me up there. I did in fact build my Book component from the ground up, and with the beta-release I included the source-code.

‘Mike Morty’ made something of ten comments at the time of the alpha-release claiming that my code was actually what I had stolen from Ely.
At a certain point these comments started to become both repetitive and offensive, and I eventually decided to delete them.

After that, this guy (or girl?) apparently made it a personal mission to post comments on every blog linking to mine, trying to convince people that I had committed plagiarism.
This is obviously not the case, look at the source-code of my component if you want to.

I thought I’d let you all know.