This page explains the technology behind Tweetpond and lists people who have informed and inspired its development.
Libraries
Tweetpond is built in Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript3 using the following publicly available libraries:
- Papervision3D 2.0: Open Source real-time 3D engine for Flash (MIT License)
- Tweetr by SWFJunkie: Twitter API for Flash (New BSD License)
- TweenMax by GreenSock: AS3 tweening engine (GreenSock “No Charge” license)
- As3corelib by Adobe: AS3 library for several basic utilities (New BSD License)
- Mac OS X Mouse Wheel Support by Ali Rantakari (MIT License)
Water surface simulation
The algorithm for water surface simulation comes from the book Mathematics for 3D game programming and computer graphics by Eric Lengyel. This algorithm is demonstrated in the following blog posts:
- PaperVision3D Fluid simulation by Yamasv
- Fluid Simulation PV3D and Away3D by Exey Panteleev
- Fluid Dynamics with WPF by Matt Dotson
You may also want to read Animating vertices in Papervision3D by Bartek Drozdz.
Billboarding
Tweetpond displays tweet text using standard Flash TextFields that are rendered as part of the 3D scene. This is often called “billboarding” or “point sprites”, and the implementation is based on DisplayObject2D by Blitz Agency, later revised for Papervision3D 2.0 by Sleepy Design.
The version used in Tweetpond solves the Z-ordering issues reported when using DisplayObject2D with Papervision3D 2.0.
Other sources
- Tweet formatting and linking is adapted from Utilizing Regular Expressions in AS3 by Jim Jeffers
- Additional 3D primitives for Papervision come from Professional Papervision3D Book by Mike Lively
- The relative time script for Twitter is based on the work of Jesse Edwards
- Feed handling was inspired by RSS Visualisation with PV3D and Minimalcomps by Mike Britton and RSS Widget Tutorial over at Yourminis
- The mouse icon has been adapted from Mysitemyway.
About this site
The Tweetpond website uses WordPress as the content management system and the brilliant Thematic Theme Framework by Ian Stewart of Themeshaper. The button CSS is borrowed from there as well. The homepage uses parts of Yahoo! UI Library Grids CSS for layout and the “Share this” functionality is provided by AddThis. We also use Joe Sak’s auto fill function for form field input prompts.
Tweetpond is an experiment copyright © 2009 Volkside. All rights reserved.
