The other weekend I was playing with APE. I must say, even though APE isn’t the most advanced physics engine for the Flash Platform out there, it is definitely easy to get up and running with. Maybe this is because of the limiting functionality of APE. The particles that APE offers are quite limited, Rectangle, Circle and Wheel. But still, there are some nice effects achievable with these three particles.

The main limitation I ran into when playing with APE was the fact that I couldn’t easily detect if a particle collided another particle. In the end, I ended up modifying the APE source by letting the AbtractItem (the base class for the AbstractParticle class) inherit from the Flash EventDispatcher class and modified the collision testing code in the CollisionDetector class to dispatch an event when a collision occurred.

Once in a while I get requests or bug reports for flex2ant. Like the other day, I received a request for a fix of this one bug from two different people. Apparently a blog had popped up that discuses flex2ant (amonst other things). I knew that the problem in question was caused due to operating system differences but I didn’t really have the time to look into the problem.

When I received the second email explaining the issue I decided to have a look at it because the problem was starting annoy me. It didn’t annoy me that people report bugs, but the fact that there was a problem with flex2ant. And since I always try to fix bugs to code ASAP instead of pushing it forward, I loaded up up Eclipse, synchronized the project with the Subversion repository to be sure I had the latest copy and fixed the issue in about 2 min. Updating the website however, took me about 10 min.

So, there you go. If you’re a flex2ant user then get your new copy from the download area of the website. Happy Flexing!