Almer/Blank Labs

I just came across one of the coolest AS3 toolkits I’ve seen in a long time – Hype. Basically, the point of Hype is to make UI design as easy and fast as possible. It includes commonly used algorithms used in visual and audio design such as grids, shapes, random placement, chaos patterns, and audio spectrum calculations. It’s also capable of calculations such as custom timing (run a callback every 2nd frame, etc) with minimal coding requirements, and a callback system that is much more efficient than AS3’s native Event system. Another great feature is the use of Object pooling and unordered lists. The concept of this is to minimize Object creation (thereby keeping memory requirements as small as possible) by recycling Objects rather than recreating them on the fly. This is obviously a standard best practice when designing code projects, but Hype will do the dirty work for you and let you focus on the fun stuff. From the looks of the intro video, the toolkit looks to be well-written using a combination of a core framework and an extension package (which is highly flexible and easily built upon). It looks like a minimal set is included for now, but I’m sure additional extension kits will be added along the way (plus allow developers to add/share there own). The framework is slated for release on Saturday, October 31st. Check out the video HERE, and the examples HERE. Happy coding