In a post entitled Testing the Flash Gradient Fill Method, and Some Personal Thoughts, Kinglong’s Blog (zh) presents a neat little swf reminiscent of the test swf in Psyark’s DisplacementMapFilter Tutorial. This one demonstrates the effects of various parameters of the beginGradientFill() method in Flash. (But not all the parameters. I’d like to see it extended, and a little larger.)

The controls are all clear to the non-Chinese reader, except for the selector at bottom left. It’s “fillType: linear/radial.”

Here’s what Kinglong has to say:

Recently when developing a Flash component, I needed to implement gradient fills (beginGradientFill) in ActionScript. Previously I had little understanding of the matrix used in this method. I searched on the Web and found some information, but it was all pretty unclear! So I wrote this test program to gain basic understanding of the method. I hope it’s useful for everyone; I call this “using a program to study a program”! I hope those who study AS coding can also learn this mode of thinking, and can “use a program to study a program” to understand the real meaning of other methods! That’s much better than reading dry docs.

“Learning Flash development is really not dull!”

Yes, indeed. May we all “Learn from model developer Kinglong!”

Meanwhile, over on the mother ship, Clive Whitear of Adobe Consulting has come up with a Transition and Tween Explorer, and a couple of weeks ago Peter Baird of the same group posted a Flex 2 Style Explorer.

Flash Insider suggests that Adobe build explorers into the Flash UI.

Explorers!

UPDATE 2006/4/24: Keith Peters is in the Explorers Club too! Check out the Noise Explorer and Perlin Explorer in his FITC presentation!

UPDATE 2006/5/17: Here’s a link to the updated Flex 2 Style Explorer Beta 3.