October Meeting Follow-Up: Ryan Taylor's Animation System

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:15:00 -0400

I wanted to post an entry about last night's meeting featuring Ryan Taylor from Schematic to recap the event. Ryan's presentation on his Animation System was excellent and I believe that everyone at the meeting got a lot out of the session.

Ryan began the presentation explaining the differences between timeline and programmatic animation, showing the advantages and disadvantages to both. Then Ryan went into the math of animating, which quite honestly is the most math I've endured since high school (and that was a long time ago). I was truly impressed with Ryan's confidence and knowledge when it comes to programmatic animation. He really understands what makes an animation work and relayed that to the audience well.

Finally, after getting us the background that we needed to understand what his Animation System offered, Ryan demonstrated the many things that you can do with very few lines of code. Built in ActionScript 3.0, Ryan's Animation System can use either the Enter Frame Event or a Timer to control animations. I loved seeing that you can write one line of code to animate an on-screen object in ways that would normally take many, many more lines. By the end of his demonstrations I could clearly see the time and money that can be saved using this system. Finally, Ryan showed showed the presentation that John Grden used at MAX last week that combined PaperVision3D with Ryan's Animation System. It was very interesting.

Ryan's Animation System is currently at v2.0 and can be found here. Ryan said that the system has an MIT License and developers may do what they want with the code. Ryan has also gone to to trouble of documenting the system and providing all of the demonstration files within the code download.

Thanks, Ryan, not only for presenting but for giving back to the community.

February 2007 Meeting Follow-Up

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 18:39:00 -0400

Jesse Warden did an incredible job presenting on Tuesday night. I look forward to Jesse's presentation on Using Flash with Flex later in the year.

As promised, Jesse has posted his examples from his presentation: Dynamic Flash with Amazon (Actionscript 1), Dynamic Flash with Twitter, and his mash-up Dynamic Flash with Yahoo Maps and FlightAware.

Don't forget, our next meeting on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 will have the developers of SpringWidgets showing us how to create our own widgets. Don't forget to RSVP for this event!

Adobe Flash Platform User Group of Atlanta - Follow-Ups

October Meeting Follow-Up: Ryan Taylor's Animation System

February 2007 Meeting Follow-Up