The paperCrane’s view from the reverseFold

On the way home last Thursday I decided to try creating fractal letters. The idea was to replace each “line” in a simple version of a letter with a copy of itself but allow for the aspect ratio of its dimensions to change so that the result is still recognizable as a letter. This is something like an L-system, of which the Dragon curve is one. After a weekend’s worth of work I have what amounts to thirteen different fractal letter algorithms for six different letters. 1 P, 3 A, 2 E, 2 R, 2 C, 3 N. Yes, those spell PAPERCRANE. Here is the first iteration (just the letters).

Fractal Letters, iteration 1

And here is the fifth iteration:

Fractal Letters, iteration 5

Some letters have variations in how they are drawn or how they repeat, or both (hence the 2 lines). The bottom N uses an algorithm I worked out which didn’t change the aspect ratio and had only one repetition per line. Both of the N variants in the words use two repetitions per line and constrict the width faster than the height, which leaves the N recognizable. The idea here, after all, was to make letters which had a cool fractal look but could still be read.

Click either of the pictures to view the flex app and play with the iterations yourself. Just drag (or click on) the slider on the bottom of the app to change the iteration.

Stay tuned, I have another blog post coming up soon specifically about that N on the bottom, the math required to create the algorithm, and some interesting (and beautiful) results I got when implementing a test program.

A coworker of mine is a big proponent of black backgrounds in his IDE, so much so that he’s sticking with FlexBuilder 2 as FlexBuilder 3 doesn’t seem to allow changing the black color of the period, semi-colon, comma, numbers, and possibly other tokens. If anyone knows how to change these colors, possibly by editing files in jars as in FlexBuilder 2 please let me know. If you don’t please vote for the bug he opened (FB-11574).

For a while now I’ve had to manually right click on any fla files in my FlexBuilder projects then choose Open With then System Editor for them to open correctly. In FlexBuilder 2 simply trying to open the file would open a text editor in FlexBuilder with the binary file contents in it and FlexBuilder 3b2 would give me the following error:

Unable to open external editor null
(com.adobe.flexbuilder.ui.osx.FlashExternalEditor)

Reason:
Plug-in com.adobe.flexbuilder.ui was unable to load class
com.adobe.flexbuilder.ui.osx.FlashExternalEditor

But at least it was trying to load Flash. I just found a magic bullet workaround for getting this to work right every time in FlexBuilder 3b2 (at least for me).

1. Go to the Flex Builder menu and choose Preferences…
2. Expand General, then Editors and choose File Associations
3. Choose *.fla in the File types list
4. Choose Adobe Flash Editor in the Associated Editors list
5. Click the Remove button to the right of the Associated Editors list
6. Click OK

Now your fla files will open with the system editor (Adobe Flash hopefully) by default.

I’ve opened a bug with Adobe: FB-10670.

UPDATE: this is also needed and works fine for me with FlexBuilder 3 beta 3.