I became interested in Flash after doing a visualization using Python a few days ago, because bitmap image is too limited to create a clean and sharp pictures. Moreover, bitmap image authoring tools usually do not provide a way to create user interaction.
Some of you might remember a web site called “twistori” came out last year and drew some media attention then. I set a goal of creating a imitated application using flash in order to motivate myself. I’d like to thank those who made the original twistori for their creative work. It’s really inspiring.
So, here is my first flash pet. (http://twistori.oksure.net/)
Twistori – Flash Version
Click to enlarge
How to use?
- You can type the keyword you want to track in the skyblue box on the top left corner, which is different from the original twistori.
- I did not allow users to type “space” in the keyword, and all keywords submitted will be changed to lowercase.
- Since Twitter limits the number of API calls from a single IP address as 100 per hour, I am caching search results. The cache is refreshed every hour.
- You can see the history keyword under the skyblue box, and those texts are clickable.
- On the right pane, tweets will be flowing. Web page addresses (i.e. http://) and twitter names are clickable as well.
For those who interested in which tools or libraries I used, I listed them below.
What I used?
- Flex Builder – It’s a little expensive, but I got the educational license. If you are a student, a faculty, or a staff of eligible education institutions, you might want to check it out. Here is the website for submitting the petition. https://freeriatools.adobe.com/flex/ Don’t be scared by the title “Flex”. You can use it as an actionscript project development tool as well.
- Flare – This is one of most popular free actionscript libraries, I think. The web page is here. http://flare.prefuse.org/ It provides a library for animating objects. In addition to the greatness of the library itself, its tutorial is very helpful especially to novice flashers like me. The tutorial (http://flare.prefuse.org/tutorial) covers not only Flare libraries but also entry-level actionscript project. The tutorial is based on Flex Builder, so you might need to get the tool anyway in order to follow the tutorial.
I created Korean version as well. It’s on http://twistori.oksure.org/. If you can read and understand Korean, I would recommend you to visit it, too. 
