Josh Talks Flash

Note: This project was written for an early, pre-release version of Flash 9. Have a look at my MXNA Dashboard, which has been updated to work with the proper final version of the player.

I had a lot of fun building a treemap of the MXNA last week. With the framework laid, I spent some time sprucing things up. Some Flex buttons give the map a little depth, and with a few color changes here and there, they easily match the MXNA color scheme. I’ve also expanded the map to show two different views. You’ll be able to tab between the most popular posts and the most recent. My next job will be to add category views.

With the exciting Flex Developer Derby on the horizon, I decided to try out some dashboard-like functionality. On the left side, I added a full listing of all the stories in the map. Above that, I’ve put together some interesting statistics on the displayed data. Ignoring various common words like “the” or “is”, you can view the top five keywords that appear in the titles of the current articles. I’d like to think it will give a good idea of what’s hot on the MXNA on those days where everybody’s posting about something exciting. I may add post excerpts at some point to make it even more accurate. The analysis also captures the most active posts. I hope to find more statistics to extract from the data.

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