Even though I’ve always been told that explaining the joke is bad form, it’s never stopped me from doing that. This one was too good to pass up – the classic Flex Your Head compilation which documented the DC hardcore punk scene in 1982, combined with Adobe’s Flex product and my head banging on the wall trying to use it.
I got a chuckle out of it.
My experience with Flex has been relatively painless so far, the developer network and the sharing that goes on is pretty impressive. Lots of people are very accomodating, offering their code and techniques. I have a bit of history with Action Script, which is the programming language attached to Flash, which also works with Flex. It’s very similar to C, and bears a resemblance to Lingo which was used by Macromedia in their Director project.
Now getting this to do what I want it to is a different story. I was attempting to do a timeline, where a central node was scrolling along from left to right, and highlighting and creating new connections (and repeated ones) to new people in my network. It’s been a while, so maybe it’s just the rust on my brain. I’m going to dedicate the better part of tonight to get it nailed down, maybe it’ll be a simplified visualization with some sort of text? I did find a great example of how to do the network mapping side of things. I’m not sure I can get the rest of my ideas to work though, with such a short deadline.
Enough talk more action!