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.

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.

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

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.

Its Friday, and I told myself I would get some of my processing sketches up on the blog earlier this week.   This sketch is a study I was doing on fractal attractors.   A large portion of this code is taken directly from the work of David Bollinger and his FungiScrawl Processing work.   I found playing with this sketch to be very mesmerizing, and I slowly started to tweak David’s code to make subtle artistic changes in how the attractors were rendering.   

For those of you Action Script junkies, reading the source code of Processing should be fairly easy, as it is Java.   One of the coolest things about this code is that David is dumping everything into an off-screen pixel-buffer and performing his own anti-aliasing and via a 4 pass sub-sampling algorithm.    So that might sound really sophisticated and complicated, but the code is actually very easy to read and was very approachable.    Some of what I have learned here I suspect will make its way into the guts of Degrafa at some point.

Early this week, quite by coincidence, Juan at scalenine showed me this by Matt Kenefick, which is almost exactly like what I have done here, but with Flex and AIR… way cool Matt!

I have several other features in this sketch (application in Processing parlance) that I was exploring, like being able to record certain gestures and then paste them in later, as well as other neat ways to manipulate the attractor code for different visual effects.

My name is Tom Gonzalez and I am the managing director of a software development firm that specializes in a very small niche of the business intelligence community, dashboards and data visualization. In the course of delivering projects for clients and creating unique software products, I spend a major portion of my time working with new technologies and trying to predict what turns the industry will take and how different technologies will fit together.

I have been skeptically sitting on the sidelines for the last several months, pondering the benefits of blogging. After reading the article in Business Week a few months back I realized that this medium is here to stay. What has prompted me to start my own blog, is that over the past several months I have gotten some very valuable information and insight from reading other blogs.

I have a background in computer science and visual arts and one of my primary interests is to create technologies that make life easier for people and improve the aesthetics of their environment in a way that brings them more pleasure and satisfaction with their surroundings.