This little application was born out of the desire to see how long it was going to be until my big overseas trip in September. We’ve all seen countdown timers which tell us the number of minutes until the next MAX conference or the next release of flex builder, but I wanted something bigger… something better…

I know, I know, online countdown timers are a dime a dozen. So this is certainly nothing new or ground breaking. But I think it offers an improvement over most of the ones out there. For a start, there’s no server-side code, and no needing to embed a tag in your website. This isn’t for website publishers to tell you what they are holding out for, this is for you. Dates are stored as a local shared object (flash cookie) so when you go back to the site, your times are simply there.

Secondly, it goes full screen, so you feel like a badass movie villain when you break out your laptop on the plane with your full screen red letter countdown. Until you get arrested.

Even if you don’t enjoy it, maybe your kids will have fun seeing how long it is until their birthday.

Check it out here

I’ve finally got around to publishing the source for the Light Gauge, it can be found here. The zip file also includes the source for the original Gauge component.

In the process of creating the Light Gauge, I came across a bit of a hole in the Flash/Flex class libraries. There is no proper color class that handles things like RGB-HSV conversion etc. So I’ve started on the beginnings of a Color class, At the moment it just does a few simple things like RGB->HSV and some basic functions to help with creating gradients. On the to-do list are things like CYMK, complementary colors, HSL, color temperature, and more. It can be found here.

To demonstrate the HSV capabilities of the class, there is also a Color Explorer.