Comments on: Better than a Lego Vagina award for 360Flex

By: polyGeek

polyGeek — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:00:29 +0000

@Ruben, It’s inevitable that people will develop similar components/websites concurrently and independently. And it’s going to happen more and more as the number of components grow.

It’s also inevitable that people will see someone else’s work and nab it for their own. And that’s probably going to happen more and more.

It’s unfortunate that you have had to deal with this. My only suggestion would be to write a post comparing your flipbook component to Ely’s and noting the differences.

And BTW, nice work! Both you and Ely.

Good luck, dan

By: Ruben Swieringa

Ruben Swieringa — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:02:44 +0000

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.

By: polyGeek

polyGeek — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:04:08 +0000

@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.

By: Mike Morty

Mike Morty — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:18:48 +0000

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

By: Rostislav Siryk

Rostislav Siryk — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:37:07 +0000

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.

By: polyGeek

polyGeek — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:50:17 +0000

@Randy, great recap. Thanks.

By: Randy

Randy — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:38:48 +0000

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.

By: polyGeek

polyGeek — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:26:16 +0000

@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.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 06:10:58 +0000

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

By: Quietly Scheming » Blog Archive » Why the Flex in FlexBook, or…Why a Flash Author should care (a lot!) about Flex.

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 05:44:42 +0000

[...] 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. [...]