Only Good Design will Save our World

Last night at the NYMMUG meeting, we had an excellent presentation by Jonathan Kaye, who made it all the way from Philadelphia to share with us the core concepts found in his book "Flash MX for Interactive Simulation".

Reading the book's title might lead you to think it is all about creating interfaces for machine simulations, which is covered, but as important as creating a compelling and realistic simulation is, the process of designing the structure of the systems working underneath is, from my point of view, the most valuable contribution of Jonathan's book, which was co-authored with David Castillo.

Jonathan focused in the process of translating a machine's feature set and functionality into an scalable UCM engine. UCM stands for User Interface Control Model, the OOP architecture for the Event-State-Action paradigm. We didn't get to see much of this done in ActionScript due to time constrains, but as I said above, the focus of the presentation was to show that good design is not rocket science, just a thoughtful job.