Thursday, January 31, 2008

Pixton revealed at Vancouver Flex/AIR tour


The fine folks at Business Objects hosted the the recent Vancouver stop of the Flex3/AIR Prerelease Tour. Local Adobe Evangelist Duane Nickull was bravely demoing a 4-hour-old build of Flex Builder, showing off the new features to a crowd of of about 60+ developers / designers. About half were new to the Flash platform (welcome to the party!).

Duane's quote of the night came at the Yaletown Brew Pub afterwards: After telling him that I think that Flex is the crack-cocaine of programming languages, Duane quipped "Adobe considers Flex to be the gateway-drug to AIR". Brilliant.

Star of the evening - Pixton

Local developer Clive Goodinson demoed a new online comic site called Pixton. This super awesome site was created by Clive in just two months, and includes a Flash CS3 front end married to a PHP back end. Pixton is incredibly visually appealing, plus it has very immerisive and intuitive editing capabilities. Drag a character's arm to reposition it, and the joints all move correspondingly, in a very natural manner.

You can also remix the content of other Pixton comics, if the original author permits. Duane has already used Pixton to mock co-worker Ted Patrick. Most excellent.