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Participating Frequently
October 19, 2010
Question

RedBlox - MindMapping Flash Projects

  • October 19, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 4917 views

This is my first post here on Adobe Labs, please excuse me if this is an inapproritate forum to discuss my questions/ideas.  This is a new idea I would like to share with others.

My name is Jason Redhawk and I've developed a great new framework called RedBlox (redblox.ca) in Flash AS3 over the last year.  My goal is to make this framework open-source and hoping to grab people's attention in the Adobe community.

RedBlox creates an XML blueprint of everything on your site.  Every textfield, image, menu or other component is represented as an XML node within a larger XML structure.  Child XML nodes are basically movieclips within movieclips.  Each component/XML node has a list of parameters (ie. textfield: content, css tag, width, height, etc) as well as the ability to add new functionality (rollover effect, linking content, etc) by adding additional attributes.

This framework has built-in font embedding, deep-linking, Google Analytics, dozens of pre-built core components (textfields, images, menus, scrollbars, holders, layouts, etc) as well as more complicated components (youtube, facebook, twitter, graphs, tables, etc), integrated asset libraries, complete multilingual support, debugger, animations using TweenMax and so much more.

The logic behind this kind of OOP, is that any updates to a website does not need to republish flash code all the time.  Most updates are simply to the XML blueprint files.

To facilitate any updates, I've developed a very power editor tool that maps the entire XML structure and has the ability to update the underlying XML and save it to file.  Overall, the editor tool is basically a Flash component that edits the XML blueprint files that is used to build the Flash website.  This editor tool can access any component on the website directly by simply ctrl+click (cmd+click for mac users) on the item (ie. textfield, image, etc), or by following the XML structure (parent node or child nodes).  Anyone who knows thebrain.com will understand how to navigate, it's very similar.  Users can also update the components position by holding shift down while moving the mouse (click to confirm new position).

I created a temporary home for this framework (redblox.ca).  This website is seriously under construction, but there are links to existing projects I've developed using this framework which are much nicer to look at.  As my framework is continuously improving, each project is using a slightly different versions, but all using the same core framework.  Any changes you make to those sites are not permanent, so feel free to play around.

I am in the process of creating documentation which will be available on the site as there are tons of really awesome features.

I've used this framework for a number of large projects for Nike, Purina, Rogers just to name a few.

I thank anyone who took the time to read this (and see the framework in action) and appreciate any feedback or questions you may have.  My question to Adobe and its community is that would anyone be interested in helping me further the development of the RedBlox framework?  I've been developing this framework alone for the last year and looking for support.  If there is interest, I am ready to make this open-source.

-jsn

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1 reply

Participating Frequently
November 22, 2010

Redblox is now opensource http://sourceforge.net/projects/redblox/

-jsn

Inspiring
October 29, 2013

Hi Jason, sounds interesting, unfortunately redblox.ca is giving me 403.

Cheers.

-Aaron

Participating Frequently
October 29, 2013

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your interest in Redblox. It's been a while, I forgot about this post

I still use my Redblox Framework to this day, even recently built an Android and iOS app called FireJumpers - Wildfire RTS.  It's a great way for me to update my game interface at runtime without the need to republish Flash all the time.

Due to so little traction, I didn't renew my hosting for it last month. Of course now that it's down, there's interest, ain't that Murphy's Law!  I'll see what I can do to get it back up.

Cheers,

Jason