Amazing New Particle Extension for Flash

The Partigen extension shows up as a custom panel inside of the Flash IDE and it allows you to create emitters and assign a wide variety of particle effects to them. The extension comes with a ton of great presets which you can of course modify to your own tastes. Partigen is an AS2 extension which leverages the popular Fuse animation library. Partigen is not currently available to the public but will be very soon. Be sure to check out http://desuade.com/ for the latest news about when it will hit the streets!

Adobe CS3 Icon 3D Carousel

Let’s face it, everything is better when put in a 3D carousel. It’s so played out that it’s cool. This little Flash app contains an interactive 3D carousel of all of the new icons for Creative Suite 3. Many people have complained about them but I actually really like the simplicty of them. I mean how much more could they have done with the whole nature/flower concept? I like the whole elements analogy and think it is a nice change.

Should Flash and Flex be combined?

his is something that I have thinking about lately as I work back and forth between Flash, Flex, and WPF. One thing is becoming clear to me lately. I love having the XML markup layer that is present in both Flex and WPF. It makes it much easier to keep a clean separation between the model and the view in data-driven applications. Data binding is another powerful tool that I instantly begin to miss when working in Flash.

Another feature of WPF that I really wish Flash would adopt is the generation of code when drawing graphics in the Flash IDE. It’s great to be able draw graphics in Blend and then immediately be able to see the code that was generated. This allows you to fine-tune properties of the graphic in code. The fact that you will be able to generate XML animation data from the Flash timeline is a great step in this direction.

So let’s say that Flex Builder had the ability to draw graphics and had a timeline for generating XML animations. Would there still be a need for the Flash IDE? One reason that I can think of would be that Flash allows you to create much more optimized code and smaller SWF files. Publishing an empty Flex project is already over 150k in size.

I think Expression Blend is a great example of a tool that could exist in the Flash world. You can create graphics visually and at the same time be able edit the code being generated. You can animate using a timeline which also is generating editable code. Built-in support for data binding and component styling are also nice features to have.

I’m sure that I’m missing a lot of reasons why this wouldn’t be a good idea, but it’s something to think about anyway.