I just put MillionClouds into production (it's only a soft launch, so pardon the dust, I know it's there...). It's my first public Flex application and I've enjoyed working on it every minute.
MillionClouds is a joint venture between our company and Christian Yakowlef , a renowned finnish photographer. The idea behind it is that whenever you arrange a photo shoot the only thing that you cannot control is the sky, so advertising agencies very often require replacement skies. Now you could go out and wait for the perfect weather or try your luck with any of the major image banks, but searching for just the right sky is really a drag if you have to use keywords (blueish cumulus clouds with 20% overcast on a nice day won't get you any results ;) ).
MillionClouds gives you a very nice and intuitive user interface to search for exactly the sky you need, and IMHO it's working beautifully. We've not yet tagged most of the images, but I just wanted to put this baby live. Oi, Christian, how about pulling yourself together and tagging the rest of the images, now that it's live? ;)
Try out the color sort functionality, found under the Global Filters panel. It produces some great looking results.
Comments
Nice app!
Posted by: Savvas Malamas | 21 Apr 2007 19:28:24
How are you filtering on color? Is the photo color information retrieved in Flash or in another technology an then queried?
Posted by: Z | 21 Apr 2007 19:45:33
Nice work, Tuomas. Seems you got the color search figured out also. :)
I think I noticed a small visual bug though. When in gallery and click a pic for a bit bigger version, then click again and the pic resets to original size, the reflection tweens to a value too wide, resulting in a reflection sticking out from both sides of the pic.
Posted by: Aki | 21 Apr 2007 23:42:03
correction: the bug happens when you click one pic for a bigger version, then you DON'T click the same one but go straight clicking another pic.
Posted by: Aki | 21 Apr 2007 23:45:42
Hi Tuomas, nice work indeed.
I can confirm the bug, that Aki had witnessed too.
2 questions related to the technical implementation of the image gallery: How do you control Z-index of currently zoomed in-image?
(mx:TileList does not support overlapping)
I already had some ideas and implemented them to solve this issue.
Another question, how do you control zooming of the image? Are you using combination of mx:Move and mx:Resize effects?
Here is mine implementation of this effect:
http://www.motionid.com/checkin/
Posted by: JabbyPanda | 22 Apr 2007 11:03:34
Hi Z. MySQL stores the average color for each pic and is then queried.
And thanks Aki and Andrey for the bug notice, working on it.
What comes to z-indexing, I'm not using a TileList; the gallery is a custom AS3 component derived from UIComponent. What I've come to learn during this project is that usually its easier to start a custom component from scratch than to extend one of the provied ones.
And yeah, since it's a AS3 component I don't use any of the inbuilt effects (their crap anyhow). But i've built my own variable tweeners and render each picture myself.
Posted by: Tuomas Artman | 22 Apr 2007 15:57:04
Thanks for the answers!
So, you do not blindly 100% rely on the power of Flex 2 SDK, that's great.
But you definitely take advantage of some Adobe's work:
a) ActionScript 3 language
b) Parts of Flex 2 SDK, such as States or mx:ViewStack
c) Flex Builder IDE debugging and coding
Great job!
Posted by: JabbyPanda | 22 Apr 2007 17:44:58
Hey Z. This is one of the coolest flex apps I have seen! Everything is so smooth!
Do you mind me asking on how you Tween your mouse overlays (the white border around the images)? I'm really curious on how you have it move so incredibly smooth, with no hiccups what-so-ever. Are you using the Caurina transitions Tweens? Or something you wrote yourself?
Thanks, and great job!
Posted by: Brian | 28 Dec 2007 00:08:43
Hi Brain, thanks for the kind words. I'm using our own Tweening classes, which we developed ages ago. But it really does not matter which tweener you're using, all work as smooth as our Tweening library.
The trick to create smooth animation like the ones on the rollovers is to know at which level to start using custom components derived from UIComponent. The Flex framework is great in general, but it's awfull at animating things smoothly. For example, the whole Picture grid is a custom component written from scratch. This way we have full control over all the animating and flipping of items.
Posted by: Tuomas Artman | 28 Dec 2007 11:49:33
Hi,
Great application, very smooth transition b/w each section, could you tell us that what are u using in the menu?? i figured our the login/forgot password is accordion and states, but what is the other bar ??
Regards,
Tamuir.
Posted by: Tamuir | 5 Jan 2008 18:43:12
Thanks for the kind words Tamuir. The login/forgot is actually only states, no accordion there. Everything else in the app is a mixture of boxes, canvases and custom components.
Posted by: Tuomas Artman | 5 Jan 2008 19:22:32
