as an excuse to try out the flash flex ui system i coded a small activator inhibitor texture generator. it uses cellular automata to simulate pigment cells switching between differentiated and undifferentiated states based on competing densities of the activator and inhibitor chemicals. you can play with it here and here are some sample tiling textures i made with it so far:

siberian cave maze zebra tiger red

i made textures like this before with reaction diffusion algorithms but those were much slower. thanks to bugman's webpage i learned about this nice technique. thanks bugman!

as for the ui, i found flex extremely easy to use but i've only got it working within Flash CS3 so far. when i tried with FlashDevelop and the flex sdk my swf files just explode! i haven't bothered figuring out why yet because i still have like a week left on my CS3 trial. :)

action script is pretty sweet but i'm starting to find some things that can be improved. for example there really needs to be a way for users to save the contents of a sprite to disk without the as3 needing to send the data to a server first. also the perf can use some more love. i especially don't understand how any modern language can be missing native floating point vector and matrix types. the CPUs have had SIMD instruction sets for ages, come on language designers, wake up!!! ok one last thing... ActionScript/ECMAScript is supposed to be higher level - so much easier and faster to code with - than C. so why do i have do lots more typing? in C i type "int ball;" but in AS3 i type "var ball:int;" ick. and worse in C i type "float crunch () { ... }" but in as3 i type "function crunch ():Number { ... }". typing "function" every time i write a function... ahhh so lame! ;)