Macromedia Flash has been terribly misused. Now and then, especially when my day job feels overly routine, I remind myself of Flash power with a gratuitous project.

The Steam Cylinder animation in This Old Choo Choo was my first Flash project. As a child I was fascinated by these machines, but hadn't a clue about the inside workings. I remember a western where a bad guy shot a hole in the side of a locomotive, and steam started coming out. The locomotive just kept right on going. I wondered long and hard about that but never found many answers. Even old books in an engineering college library were sketchy, since at the time of their writing it was all common knowledge, not worth mentioning. The first thing I saw that really pulled it together was a book my son was reading called the Young Engineer's Book of Super Trains. I guess children's books have improved a lot because this answered all of my early questions, and inspired me to do This Old Choo Choo. Besides the basic workings of Flash, on this project I learned that once you hit the wall, it is better to just start over in the light of fresh knowledge.

I wanted some real scientific substance in the next project. We admired an orbit simulator in Microsoft Encarta, and another one at NASA in Houston. Flash proved well suited for this, although at the time (Flash 4) I had to write my own arctangent function to keep the orbiter pointed in the right direction. There are two ways to make an app like this. One is to game it, where you write down exactly what you want to happen, and then you write the code for just exactly that. The other is a sim, where you code the physics without knowing too much about what the result may be. Outer Planet Mission is a sim, containing only gravitational attraction and Newton's Laws of Motion. This produced behaviors that surprised me at first but proved to be entirely accurate. I have tried several times to add more features, but found that keeping it dead simple was best.

Regatta Down Under was patterned along the same lines, but the physical principles were much more extensive, and the need to create a game-like scenario pushed Flash 4 to its limits. This was one of those projects that wear you out: a lot of testing over and over to make sure it is all in there right, and the final result just doesn't quite hit the mark. Fortunately I had Greg Radliff working with me to spread the load. I worked up the code and game play, then turned the file over to Greg to populate my crude symbols with some nice snazzy graphics. We were able to get something working in time to take second place in the Flashkit 1999 Sydney to Hobart game competition. Chris MacGregor, also a Houston MMUG member, won first prize with a generally similar sailboat race but a much better designed and polished product taking the alternate, gaming approach. Of course the programming side of Flash is vastly improved and such a project could be made more modular and testable.

Squareback Attack started with an illustration done for a class, and is a good answer to anyone that wants to whine about the drawing tools in Flash. I can work about twice as fast in Flash as in Illustrator, what with highly structured symbolization, the ability to select any part of a stroke, no-big-deal transparency, and pliable / mergable shapes. Anyway, if you are a car nut (and who is not) Squareback Attack is a lot of fun!

Completely unrelated to the above and not even my work, A Southern Primer was created by Mr. Bill Messer from an earlier series of newspaper articles by W. J. Cash. I learned the page was about to fall victim to web rot, and got Bill's permission to continue it here as a public service. I hope you can spend some time here and learn more about the Southern mind and spirit, seeing as (for better or worse) Southerners seem to be running the country these days. Obviously I can't take very much responsibility (if any) for the content, its presentation, broken links, or anything like that.