A blog about User Interface, User Experience, Design, Flash, Product management and all that goes in between.

A new open source vector based 3D animation engine for ActionScript called FIVe3D has recently been shared by Mathieu Badimon. Thanks Mathieu!It is a ActionScript 2 classes package, enabling 3D rotation and position control over objects such as movieclips and text fields.For setting up a simple 3D environment, with simple objects and basic interactivity it is indeed fast and pretty simple, as described by the author. I am sure in few months it will pick up some more advanced functionalities, we should be proud that such exiting initiatives are emerging in the open source sphere.I was impressed by the thorough (and beautiful..) documentation he provides with the source code, neatly packed in a pdf file. that’s the way!

From time to time I get to work on someone else’s code, could be shared classes I download or a client that brings his own program for treatments, anyway it is something that nobody likes.The difficulties are obvious to anyone that deals with code this way or another, (hey, sometimes I have hard time understanding my own code from six months ago..) But there are also great advantages if you’re trying to improve, although the learning curve is often steep, it’s faster than learning from books.Sometimes, definitely not most of them, it can even lead to a real leap, in term of understanding new styles and patterns, I never stop learning new things : )At larger scales, translating ActionScript classes into UML would be a blast, making sense in a glimpse and not through lines of code.And an answer to this need (and more!) is about to be born – Saffron UML by Samuel Agesilas, built for AIR, has a cool UI design, and platform independent – you have to see it!Looks amazing ha?