It has been a while since my last post, but I thought this was worth mentioning, as 360 Flex is fast approaching (March 7-10th in San Jose.)

Flex 360 is BY FAR the best conference you will ever attend as it relates to Adobe Flex. Unfortunately this time around I will not have a chance to speak, but Michael VanDaniker – my partner in crime for Axiis, is going to be doing a great presentation on getting the most out of Axiis.

I first attended Flex 360 back in Atlanta a couple years back, at the time the conference had been around for a year or so. I was blown away at the depth of the sessions, and the fact I could actually learn something from the conference (versus just attending the first 20 minutes of a session and feeling overwhelmingly bored.) But, probably the most satisfying part of the event is the community feel and networking that goes on. I don’t consider myself to be all that gregarious, or the “social networking” type, but at 360 Flex it made it really easy to meet other people who shared my passion for code, and specifically flex.

If I was just starting to learn Flex, this would be the place to be, I think you could probably save yourself 3 months of trail-and-error learning just by spending a few days being here. And, as someone with a fair amount of Flex experience, 360 is the place to dive deep into areas you might not have had a chance to explore yet. You will find someone an expert in pretty much any area you are interested in, whether that is binding, component lifecycle, new frameworks, or perhaps even some data viz.

Get your tickets now while they last, as the conference usually is sold out a few weeks prior.

Here is a running copy of the visualization I put together for Adobe MAX 2009.

This visualization takes data collected by ocean buoys (CDIP) and plots them visually to make it easier for myself to know when the surf is good and if it is getting better or worse.   You can watch the full presentation where I explain this visualization in detail here: http://www.twgonzalez.com/blog/?p=267

Here is a brief synopsis:

4 Buoys visualized

Each buoy breaks down wave energy along a spectrum banded by 9 ranges of wave periods.

Arc segments with longer radi represent longer periods (shorter wedges represent less powerful wind swells, longer wedges show more powerful ground swells.)

The length (size) of the arc is determined by how much energy is within that specific band of swell period (more arc length equals more energy.)

Interactivity:

1)  You can select a particular buoy by clicking its label – that will then display a 2 week history for that buoy in the histogram along the bottom.

2) You can roll over any particular wedge and see a datatip with a 12 hour history for that particular period.   The energy shown is in cm2 and represents the surface area underneath the wave – it does not directly correspond to wave height.

3)  You can  animate the 2 week period by pressing the play button within the histogram.

3)  You can pause the animation and manually move the animation forward with left/right arrow keys

4)  You can also use your mouse click to skip to any section of the time period.

I have plans to add more to this visual over time, and I actually have a version working against live data, I just need to carve out the time to publish it to my server.

Axiis Beta 1

We have just recently released the Beta 1 version of Axiis last week.

This version of Axiis is a much more stable and cleaner build than the Alpha we released back in May.   There have been performance optimizations, refactoring of our core classes, and lots of little bug fixes.   We have also added a couple new examples to our examples section.

I am personally using Axiis now in several commercial projects, and I would feel comfortable recommending it to others if you are a on the more advanced side of the Flex development spectrum.

For those of you who missed my session at Adobe MAX this year, you can see the recorded session here.    I have included a link to the source code as well at the end of this post.

I would suggest viewing the presentation directly from the Adobe site, as it provides a better user experience.  They did a great job of creating chapters in the timeline so you can skip ahead to relevant sections.

I have also included the source code which you can download from here:

http://www.twgonzalez.com/demos/SourceCode/MAX_2009.zip

For those of you attending Adobe MAX 2009, or wanting a reason to attend, I will be speaking on Advanced Data Visualization and Axiis Monday afternoon Oct 5th at 3:00pm and Tuesday afternoon Oct 6th at 1:30pm.

This purpose of this article is to introduce developers and data visualization specialists to Axiis, which is an open source data visualization project based on Adobe Flex and Actionscript 3. While you do not have to be an expert in Flex Builder or ActionScript 3, having experience in both will make understanding this tutorial easier. Throughout the article I will assume you are comfortable with the fundamentals of building an application with Flex, and understand some of the primary language constructs embodied within ActionScript 3 and the Flex SDK, primarily MXML and Binding.

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A couple of weeks ago Jeffery Houser and John Wilker interviewed me about Axiis, and just yesterday posted the interview online. 

You can hear it here at The Flex Show.

Just an hour ago I wrapped up my presentation with Michael covering the alpha release of Axiis, the open source data visualization framework he and I have been working on for the last 5 months.

As fate would have it, I ended up coming down with the cold I had successfully resisted for two weeks from my two little boys, but I think the presentation went over well, despite my nasal delivery.

Michael did a phenomenal job of doing a live demo creating a chart from scratch. Unfortunately these sessions turned out to not be recorded, so perhaps we will do a screen cast of that demo.

We are really excited to get feedback from the community and move Axiis forward to its beta launch, which will hopefully be later this summer.

I wanted to give the community a quick update on Axiis (the data visualization framework Michael and I have been working on) as I have received a lot of interest from within the community after blogging about it a few weeks ago.   First, we have been hard at work improving the core layout and render engine getting ready for our initial alpha release, which will be on May 19th, 2008.    If that date sounds familiar, it should, it is right in the middle of 360 Flex, where my talk on data visualization will focus on Axiis and how I have been using to solve some of my advanced Flex Data Visualization needs.  Our first release will be very “alpha”, but we should have enough working bits for people to start playing around and get a taste of what we are doing.

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Well, I guess it is time to finally let the cat out of the bag.  For the past few months Michael VanDaniker and I have been working away on a new open source project we have named Axiis (you can thank Juan Sanchez for the great name.)   We are still a couple months away from our first public alpha release, but I think it is worthwhile spending some time to discuss the details of what we have been developing. 

Axiis represents a new way to conceive of and develop interactive data visualizations.   It is based on Flex and ActionScript 3.0 but has a uniquely different approach to creating visualizations than the standard Flex charts, and pretty much any other data visualization package I have seen.  Our primary goal in developing Axiis is to create very concise, expressive, and flexible framework that uses a purely declarative (markup) based approach to create anything from simple cartesian charts to very complex and involved data visualizations.  

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