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Miscellany: Flash On Tap, Moccasin, and Flexcover news

This Sunday morning seems like a fine moment for one of my increasingly infrequent posts.  It’s a gentle cloudy morning in Philadelphia, where I’m about to attend the ISMIR 08 conference on music information retrieval.  Although I’ve lately been busier than I have ever been in my life, here in Philly I’m isolated enough from my accustomed surroundings that my recent work habits are not functioning.  That’s probably a good thing, for me.  About the product of those work habits I have a lot to say, but much of it must still remain discreetly veiled, as the phrase goes, for a very short while longer.  I do have some updates on some other topics and sideline projects though.

Flash on Tap has been rescheduled for the spring of ‘09.  This is some disappointing news to be sure, and I was really looking forward to both speaking and attending.  But the disappointment is definitely tempered by the realization that this is going to be a far more kick-ass event, now that it can happen at a better time.  It was a really tough decision for the organizers, and it’s tough on everyone who was involved in the conference but they absolutely did the right thing: regrouping was in everyone’s best interest.

I have a new open source project out on Google Code called Moccasin.  It deserves its own lengthy post, and I hope to get to that soon.  Moccasin is a Flex/AIR application framework aimed at a specific domain: visual object-oriented editing applications.  The term “object-oriented” here refers to what one sees in the UI — of course the code itself uses objects and classes.  Visio and PowerPoint are representative examples.  Moccasin uses an MVCS approach and builds in support for multilevel undo/redo, document marshalling and persistence, selection, direct mouse manipulation and visual feedback.  It also includes what I think is an interesting and unusual approach to model objects: models can be any value object classes with bindable properties, and need not extend or refer to any classes or interfaces in the Moccasin framework. This project needs a good overview document, but there is a complete working sample application and the whole deal is reasonably well commented.  I have built two very large projects on Moccasin, one of which is Noteflight, the other of which is an AIR-based editor for creating levels in a new 3D game (not mine). I can at least claim that it has saved me time.

Finally, the poor stepchild, Flexcover. It’s getting a nice upgrade soon with some goodies: support for Flex 3.1 (thank you Daniel Rinehart!), a new UI from Alex Uhlmann for filtering classes and packages, and a fix to the modified SDK to correctly instrument top-level global functions outside of classes.

Oh well, time to go. More later…