Here’s the newest version of the MXNA RSS Reader Flex application that was shown at 360Flex. It’s been updated and another Flex community component was added into the mix. And full source is published. I call it ZOMGZ!!1 RSS Reader.

The updated recipe is:

• FishEye component from Ely Greenfield
• Custom fisheye modifications to add the bouncing functionality to the icons
• New: Fire component from FlexLib
• Reflection component from Ben Stucki
• Distortion effects from Alex Uhlmann
• TreeMap component from Josh Tynjala
• New: Sticky Tooltip component from Maikel Sibbald

So what’s new?
I added the sticky tooltip component by Maikel Sibbald, which shows the description of the article when you hover your mouse over it. I think it looks sweet. There’s a new icon for the most popular posts of the day. There’s also an options panel (click the rightmost icon). You can configure how many posts you want to read for each category. And you can choose to use the “Smart Categories” or the regular categories that MXNA offers (not all categories have smart categories that correspond). Those options are stored in a shared object, so next time you load the app it will remember your settings. And it will automatically load the last category you were browsing. I utilized a better method for sizing the font in the TreeMap that I didn’t realize Josh had included in the component. It looks a lot better now. I had to make a small modification to the component to get it work with embedded fonts, but now the fonts looks silky smooth and they show up in the reflection. I made some performance enhancements, turns out that drawing that reflection when you’re using embedded fonts really eats up processing power.

Future development
I’ve been working on getting the source to an acceptable point to release it to the wild. I didn’t get all this code to a point I’m truly happy with, a lot of it’s uncommented, but my ADD is kicking in and I’m tired of working on it, so here it is as it is. Use it to learn, use it for inspiration, use it for whatever. The only restriction is that Josh’s TreeMap is licensed under the GPL license (AFAIK the other stuff is MIT-ish license). I dropped this into an Apollo app and it kind of makes a cool desktop RSS app, but I didn’t add anything that really makes it any better than the web version, so I’m not going to release the Apollo version. I’m not planning on working on it anymore. I’ll be working on a few other RSS visualization apps.

ZOMGZ!!1

So check out the example below. View the source here.

[Or launch it in it’s own window: here’s the link]