Gallery

A long while ago, jverbal shared with me his code for his image gallery. Great stuff, using a combination of ASP, XML and Flash MX. After digging through it for a long while, today I put together my own variation. It’s not as slick as his (I’m not using ASP here, and the Gallery doesn’t allow for multiple directory listings), but I’m pretty proud of it.

This has always been a question of mine: at what point does code "belong" to any one person? My hope is that I’m not stealing jverbal’s code and touting it as my own. I looked through how he did things, and set about creating my gallery from scratch. The biggest tips I got were mainly in terms of the combobox component, new to Flash MX. I learned about setDataProvider and setChangeHandler, and how to populate the dropdown with the contents of my arrays.

I’m not sure why I’m getting so into this whole area of ownership. I guess I want to feel that I was able to create things on my own, without relying on others. It’s a very American thing, and also an aesthetic that my parents instilled in me. But at the same time, I talk daily with so many talented programmers and designers… it’s stupid not to share and try to learn from one another.

I guess two things need to be said. First, I’m proud that I got this gallery prototype working, and that I was able to get the combobox component to function. I feel like I did struggle and tested and worked my way to the final product.

The second thing would be this: jverbal is the man. :)

Here’s the working version of my gallery.

PS – The images are from Alabama, and have a white border (prototype!). And the captions are from The Onion.