Here’s a little demo Flex app I put together. It’s another MXNA RSS reader (I know, I know, like there aren’t anough of those already). But really I didn’t start out making an RSS reader, I started playing with Ely Greenfield’s FishEye component. Then I figured it would be cool to have the icons I used for the FishEye component rotate a badass 3d cube thingy, which uses the awesome distortion classes from Alex Uhlmann. And of course it’s got to have the requisite web 2.0 reflection, which was made by Ben Stucki. Then I figured that I should have something sweet displayed in the rotating cube, and I remembered Josh Tynjala’s TreeMap component. And I remembered seeing a demo of an MXNA reader that Josh had made using that TreeMap component, so that’s how I ended up making another RSS reader.

Why is this important?
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the Flex component developer community. Projects are starting, developers are coming out of the woodwork, the community’s buzzing. This little demo shows a combination of open-source Flex components from four different developers, put together by a fifth developer (me). All the code I used has been released by the authors for free use. It’s all available to browse through, learn from, improve, etc. Now if only it was all consolidated into one central location…

And we’re only at the beginning. Keep an eye out for new Flex components, my prediction is that we’re going to see an avalanche of awesome components.

So anyway, here’s my little demo. It just loads the most recent posts on MXNA for whatever category you select (by clicking on one of the icons at the bottom).

Here’s the recipe:

• FishEye component from Ely Greenfield
• Custom modifications to add the bouncing functionality to the icons
• Reflection component from Ben Stucki
• Distortion effects from Alex Uhlmann
• TreeMap component from Josh Tynjala

Add them all together and this is what you get:
[Or launch it in it’s own window: here’s the link]

Source for this demo isn’t released yet, I put it together quickly, so it’s not quite up to my own standards.