Recently, I started seriously diving into OpenFL and Haxe. I’m the creator of Feathers UI, an open source, user interface component library built on Adobe AIR and Starling. Both Starling and Feathers were officially sponsored by Adobe for a number of years, but with #Flash2020 right around the corner, the company has recently scaled back their community investments. I’d like to find a new home for Feathers UI because I’m not ready to be finished with this project. In fact, I think Feathers can have a very bright future with a new foundation built on OpenFL and Haxe.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been building prototypes of the Feathers core architecture and getting the hang of Haxe and its differences with ActionScript. In the process, I even ended up submitting a pull request to improve OpenFL’s implementation of scale9Grid. @singmajesty merged it right away, and it’s great to see him take my changes and run with them to improve scale9Grid even more.
It’s been such a positive experience for me, that I realized that I want to go beyond prototypes and create a new, fully-supported version of Feathers powered by OpenFL/Haxe. If you’ve previously used Feathers UI with AIR/Flash, or if you think that it could be an excellent addition to your tool belt, I’d like to hear from you because I want to start a crowdfunding campaign for this new version of Feathers.
I’ve set up a landing page with a some more information and a sign-up form here:
Nice to see you here @joshtynjala ! I switched from as3 to haxe over a year ago and it’s been a joy to port my game to haxe except for the UI part… which used feathers had to rebuild it using stablexui, which was painful at start
Currently working on a small air mobile app (contract work) and using feathers again made me realize I’d reaaaally love a haxe version of Feathers. This is exciting news to me, and I think it would also help quite a lot of people to jump from as3 to haxe.
on a side note I had to use chrome to subscribe because it didn’t seem to work with FireFox (could be because I use a few privacy-related plugins ?)
I’m really happy to hear that. I’m beyond excited about all of the support I’m seeing from the community so far!
Yeah, it could be your extensions. When I tested that the form was working, I actually used Firefox, and I verified that my subscription went through successfully.
Wow, this is really exciting news. I know virtually nothing about OpenFl, but it looks like a very promising alternative to AS3/AIR. Looking forward to seeing how this develops. Totally signed up!
I probably need something like Actuate for animation, but I don’t expect any other dependencies to be necessary. Like the Starling version, I definitely want to keep it as light as I can.
Are you looking for devolpers to help on the project? I have done quite a bit of ui work in OpenFL most notably https://github.com/pxshadow/app
I’d be happy to work on this.
Actually I build that openFL port. I just didn’t have git account back then and joshua uploaded it for me.
There are a few problems there I have fixed locally. And yes, it was hardcore specially for the abstraction layer.
But for Joshua, is best to start from scratch or porting the latest AS3 version, the port I made was using a pretty old version compatible with my games.
Hi Josh, great news that you like in OpenFl and Haxe ! Looking forward to your progress.
Have you taken a look at HaxeUI v2 ? It has a solid base for xml, layout, styling and supported frameworks/targets. IMHO it would be interesting to share as much as possible since a well supported UI framework is important, and Haxe community not that large !
I am very excited to see this. Looking forward to feathers on openFL, flash is on life support at this time and it only makes sense to bring this over to Haxe/Openfl.
https://feathersui.com/openfl/
