FlexBook brings forgotten book to life

In 2002 my Uncle Mike Hancock (yes we have the same name) made a cute little book for Mamma's Hands describing the program and featuring the most public figure of the organization the famous Mamma's Hands bus. Unfortunately this little book has not been seen by more than five or ten people because in its do-it-yourself print form it is limited to being seen by one person at a time and was not of sufficient quality to be used very much. When I first came across the book I thought we needed to distribute the book somehow but after dealing with printers a couple of times I did not want to venture into the publishing realm again and attempt to reproduce this physically. So after letting this book sit in my folder for a little over a year I came across the concept of a flash flexbook and the future of the book became alive again.

The flexbook is a pretty popular implementation of flash's 3d potential that can be data-driven and implemented quite easily with flex. What I had to do was scan all of the pages including the front and back cover, trim each page to be the identically sized so that the proportions are preserved, then make and xml document that contained the urls of all the images and then I was ready to insert the flexbook component. The component has a lot of adjustable parameters mostly dealing with style, colors, 3d effects and how much of the page to be sensitive to page flips etc. The implemented copy of this project can be found at http://mh.realwebstrategy.com/flash/third.html Please flip through it and see the sweet story brought to life thanks to the internet and Adobe Flex.