ArcadeFly.com – Back!

Back in June/July of ’05 Google first released the public API for Google Maps. At that time that was something I’d really been waiting for, and quickly (in about 3 weeks of spare time) built this really cool Google maps application for finding arcades across the USA, and filtering by various criteria such as arcade name, or a game at that location. The map was pretty slick in that wherever you were it would show all items that matched the criteria you were currently filtering for. Unfortunately the JavaScript for this task was utterly huge, and it was only about a month after my first attempts at anything *AJAX,* so it was far from clean code. Around that time my mom passed away, and coding for fun in my spare time fell to more important things like probate, being a sudden landlord and various other personal representative duties, not to mention everything else. Only recently when I put this site back up, along with [Floridiots](http://www.floridiots.us) did I feel like I was getting back into the flow of life I was in before that day. Which makes getting [ArcadeFly.com](http://www.arcadefly.com) up and running again that much more special. After a lot of reading on Friday, I spent a lot of yesterday and today working on this new interactive flex site, more hoping to learn about the language than to create something everlasting. It’s current state is more a testament to how easily Flex is to learn than anything else — that someone who’s never seen the language can create something like that in a weekend. I honestly think there were more lines of JavaScript than this entire application (cfc + mxml). Anyway, the pre-beta-first-attempt-at-anything-prototype version is up and working. More to come soon, although I’ll probably take a few days break from it after this weekend and then come back and improve. Also- – I’ve published the source of the app, so should any Flex guru’s read this, feel free to comment on anything that I might be able to improve on.