What’s all the HYPE about?

Branden Hall and Joshua Davis have collaborated on a new framework called HYPE. Their aim with HYPE is to help bring back the playfulness that once defined the Flash community.

Getting Started

The HYPE framework lowers the barrier for people to begin playing with Flash by offering a lot of functionality out-of-the-box. It’s really easy to get started with HYPE, just download the framework from the homepage. They’ve even put together a nice set of installation and setup instructions, which shows you everything from how to install the files to adding basic functionality. Branden has also posted a Halloween themed tutorial screencast that shows how to use some of the core functionality of HYPE.

There’s a plethora of examples, with code, on the site too. The examples vary from demonstrating sound analysis, object pooling and swarm behaviours amongst others.

Extending HYPE

Branden has posted a video that shows the developer through the various packages within the framework. It’s really easy to create your own extensions to the framework, and I’m sure that in a few months we’ll see a lot of developers posting their own rhythms and layouts.

My Experiment

I’ve been looking forward to playing with the HYPE framework since Joshua and Branden started tweeting about it. I love the idea of them doing the leg work for us, allowing us to just play with code. One of the areas I’ve always been interested in is audio visualizers, and what’s really cool is that HYPE contains sound analyzers out-of-the-box. So rather than me spending days getting bogged down in code, I was able to put together the following simple visualiser in a couple of hours.

Click on the image above to see it in action, as soon as I can find a decent code plugin for wordpress I’ll post the source code.

I hope HYPE will gain a lot of ground amongst the community, it’s a brilliant framework with a great aim and something I’ll be playing with more in the future.