1) country regions are now interactive on the globe, just mouse over a country;

2) select a country with a mouse click;

3) there is a new 2D source world map plane with a slight X-axis rotation;

4) new map color scheme with different strokes and fill colors for the up, down and selected country states;

5) country tooltips display was added too, although it’s in French;

Click on the screenshot below to see it in action.

V.2 will see some Away3D HoverCamera action to orbit the globe on mouse move and clicks, English tooltips for countries with ISO 3166 2-letter country code for region ids, and hopefully some open-source Degrafa world map and globe code to share.

Related Posts

• Some cool 3D stuff and Degrafa Maps coming soon

Flickorama 3D Update and Camera Work

Inspired by the PlexiGlass (OpenFlux 3D) example that opened easy to use Element Flow-like capabilities to Flex applications, I created Flickorama mashup last year to explore public photos from Flickr.

You can read about it in my outdated by now Flickorama update post or see an independent Flickorama review by Eric Miraglia on his Impressive Pixel blog.

A lot has changed in Flickorama since then. The added camera work with pan, tilt and zoom features provided by the tucked in Away3D engine, along with the added keyboard navigation make it a breeze now to flip through a stack of photos. I also added new Random view layout option and integrated my Flickr Flipbook, but that deserves a separate post.

Random3DView Demo and List3D

The only reason I am rambling about those updates because while digging through openflux plexiglass trunk code I’ve tried different layouts and cameras, ended up adding a couple of my own and making some tweaks to existing cameras and layouts for improved interaction and user experience.

Now, I have not seen any updates to the openflux library recently, and I am not sure about openflux roadmap or future development work, although I really like the separation of model, view, layout and 3D perspective that this library provides.

However, if you have an application that requires similar 3D list view display, I created a Random3DView demo that demonstrates the setup behind Flickorama 3D photo viewer. You can view Random3DView source code and the resulting camera and layout work in the updated Flickorama 3D mashup.

While working on Random3DView I realized that there must be many applications that could benefit from a simple List3D view component that taps into Away3d capabilities with OpenFlux Plexiglass or some other MVC framework overlayed, yet hidden and nicely encapsulated for simple List 3D data binding and rendering.

So, I’ve decided to do some refactoring on my Random3DView code and see if I can create a reusable List3D component that will make it very easy for anyone to put together a Flex application like Flickorama, backed by the powerful Away3D engine with some Tweener animation and different layouts, in minutes. Stay tuned for updates.

Degrafa Maps and Globe

Some Degrafa world maps in various projections and mapping to 3D globe with Flex 3D are coming in the next few weeks too.

You can see some early demos of my Degrafa maps here. Some nights and weekends were spent on converting blank SVG maps of the world to make those interactive maps with selectable regions and countries in Flex. I am currently rethinking how those maps are configured and loaded.

You can see a production version of my Degrafa mapping technology used in a Beer Hunter application on destinationbeer.com.

This Flex 3D Earth demo and my poking in Away3D lately gave me some ideas on creating a rotating Degrafa Globe that I am planning to enable and get it to work with my degrafa map, zoom in, tooltips and all the 3d camera rotation and tilt effects.

So, check back for some demos and new open source List3D and Map3D components soon.

Related Posts

• Flickorama update
• Flickorama – OpenFlux PlexiGlass Flickr Mashup
• Flex 3D Degrafa Earth Globe with 2D World Map Plane
• From Day 1 of Flex SVG Explorer Dev and Research
• Back to SVG and a cup of Java ME

New Features:

• Slideshow thumbnail photo strip
• Large Photo View
• Full Screen View
• Link to the photographer’s photostream
• Photo highlights, transparency, borders, drop shadows and typography enhancements

Slideshow Photo Strip

The most notable change is the new slideshow control bar at the bottom of the application screen:

You’ll notice large Start Slideshow (play) button on the left and a scrollable photo strip control with thumbnails from the currently displayed photo set. The photo strip control will display left and right scroll buttons automatically if all the thumbnails from the currently displayed photoset don’t fit on your screen. Photo strip scrolling is enabled on mouse over. You still need to click on the Next/Previous Set buttons to load photo sets.

The photo strip is fully synchronized with the OpenFlux PlexiGlass list view. So, when you shuffle images in the main 3D view by dragging images around, you’ll notice they are shuffled in the photo strip as well.

I also added photo highlighting and tooltips that display photo title and clearly indicate the selected photo in PlexiGlass list view and photo strip. In addition, the slideshow control bar, buttons and image boxes now have a refined treatment of borders, transparency, caption display with text truncation, drop shadows and glow filters.

Large Photo View

I am still not completely satisfied with the Large Photo view, but the latest version has some new features that make it more flexible and usable for the slideshow and different 3D photo set layouts. Here is the snapshot of the Large Photo View canvas:

When you click on the selected photo or double click on the photo thumbnail, the Large Photo view is displayed. This photo view canvas is draggable and you can reposition it in the main view to place it in the most convenient location. You can also toggle between medium (500×500) and large (750×750) photo view by double-clicking on the Large Photo image.

The caption box in the Large Photo view displays photo title, date taken, and has a link to the photographer’s photostream. The photostream link opens new browser window and links directly to the flickr photostream page for now. I plan to extend this feature to load the original photographer’s photostream in Flickorama in the future.

Full Screen View

The top application control bar has two new buttons: Large Photo on the left and Full Screen View button on the right:

The Large Photo button opens the Large Photo View and Full Screen button allows to break out of the browser window and view Flickorama full screen.

The toggle buttons in the middle are for switching between the different 3D Photoset Layouts. The currently supported layouts are:

• Cover Flow
• Vertical Cover Flow
• Carousel
• Grid
• Spiral
• Roller Coaster
• Time Machine

I am considering adding Book, Sphere and Collage photo set layouts eventually.

Under the Covers

Quite a few changes, bug fixes and enhancements were added behind the scene. Images are now pulled directly from flickr without an extra pass through the image proxy on my server. I also switched to using Ely’s Super Image for image loading and caching. Image caching and direct loading from flickr gave flickorama a noticeable performance boost.

I still need to play a little with image caching settings and profile the whole application. It performs well for a casual user, but you might encounter problems if you go through over a thousand of photos.

What’s next?

I am planning to add Advanced Search options and Tag Cloud, generated from the currently displayed photo set, to provide extra search and explore options.

Other ideas:

• Going AIR :)
• Multi-tab Flickorama
• Save your favorite pics and searches
• Geo-search

Related Posts

• Flickorama – OpenFlux PlexiGlass Flickr Mashup
• Another hit…
• Some cool 3D stuff and Degrafa Maps coming soon
• 2008 Campaign Finances Remix — Mashup of the Day!

Here is the Flickorama with sample layouts:

Cover Flow:

Roller Coaster:

Time Machine:

There are more layouts available and a larger photo preview feature that is currently in beta.

With Flickorama you can search public Flickr photos by tags, paginate through the returned photo sets, or sit back and let the sequential or random photo slideshow flickr on your screen.

I’ve been sitting on this prototype since Ryan Campbell put together that OpenFlux 3D PlexiGlass cards example. When I first saw it, I knew that’s the UI to use for some fun Flickr pics browsing.

First, I wired it to Flickr to demo some alternative image gallery display options to one of my clients. I ended up using Ely Greenfield’s Display Shelf component for that project.

However, I was so far along into wiring OpenFlux PlexiGlass to Flickr that I have decided to spend some extra time to add photo set pagination and cleanup the UI a bit.

You can access it on my new site: http://www.randomfractals.com/Flickorama/Flickorama.html

I’ll be hosting my most interesting prototypes and demos on that site from now on.

I should also give credits to Juan Sanchez for the shadow Flex UI theme I’ve used for this application and Brian Kent for the really cool AEnigma Scrawl font he created. I’ve seen it used in quite a few Flex apps lately.

Related Posts

• Flickorama update
• Another hit…
• Some cool 3D stuff and Degrafa Maps coming soon
• 2008 Campaign Finances Remix — Mashup of the Day!