Toying around with bubbling and capturing events in Flash CS3, I decided to make a pun on the displayObject tree and render it as an actual tree:

The “trunk” is the root object, the two branches coming off it are its child DisplayObjects, and so on.  If you mouse over a branch, a frame appears around its DisplayObject, and all its parents light up green as the MOUSE_OVER event bubbles upward.  Click a branch, and you get to watch both the capture and bubbling event phases play out in slow motion.

I’ve been playing with Context Free , a programming language for generating art.  It’s great for making fractal-ish images like this:

The above took 13 lines of code.  The concepts here are a little different than what I’m used to: You write a grammar, and Context Free outputs a graphical “sentence” in whatever language you’ve thus defined.  CF is minimal — the only shape primitives are square, circle, and triangle, and the only control-flow capabilities are a “do N times” construct, recursion, and weighted random branching.

Is it useful?  You could probably generate some interesting art for a webpage background or other image — Context Free exports to SVG and PNG — but it’s mainly worth playing with for the intellectual stimulation.

Hail, holy light, offspring of heaven’s first born,

Or of the eternal co-eternal beam,

May I express thee unblamed?

…Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move

Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird

Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid

Tunes her nocturnal Note.