The Code behind the Art

A few people have asked about getting the code that has created some of the images here. There are a few things I should say about that.

One is that I want this site to be more about the images than an open source code repository. Not that I’m against sharing the code, but I don’t want that to be the focus here.

Two is that the code that has created most of the images here is ephemeral. I open up Flash or Flex Builder, start messing around, take some screen shots when something looks good, keep messing around and before long the code that resulted in the first image is long gone, having morphed into something else entirely. I may even leave it off in a completely broken state, or in some cases, if I’m working in Flash, I never even end up saving the FLA with the code in it. So 99% of the time, sharing the code that created image X is impossible.

Finally, on a more positive note, the way I usually work is to open up Flash and start messing about with code on the timeline. Often, when I come up with a theme or construct I really like and will probably want to re-use in the future, I hop over to Flex Builder and start creating some classes for it, abstracting it into a class that can be easily used. I will start releasing some of these classes on BIT-101. For example, I now have a Globe class that created the image shown in today’s post. You’ll be seeing a few more globes in the coming days, and I’ll be working on cleaning up the class to make it ready to distribute, and then it will be all yours. I have some other, VERY cool classes in progress too, the results of which you will be seeing here over the next couple of weeks. Eventually I’d like to put together a graphics library containing some of this stuff. Again, this would be released on BIT-101, not here, but I’m sure I’ll mention the fact here with a link.

8 thoughts on “The Code behind the Art

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