People may or may not not know that the concept for Degrafa originated with something Jason Hawryluk created in Flex 2 called the Primitive Explorer. It basically allowed you to explore different primitive shapes and download the classes to be used in a project via MXML markup and CSS.

Well, nearly 2 years later Degrafa has come full circle to now add these shapes (along with a ton of others) to the framework to be accessed via MXML markup. We’re calling these new sets of classes “Auto Shapes”. You might be familiar with the term if you use Fireworks.

Each of the Auto Shapes is unique geometry that has it’s own set of properties, just like the base Degrafa geometry. For example, there is a DonutAutoShape and you can set both the inner and outer radius (along with other properties).

The nice thing about Auto Shapes is it cuts a lot of the work out of trying to compose multiple shapes together to get the desired final shape. Also, if you were to composite shapes together you wouldn’t have access to the properties that are unique to the shape.

Below is an example of some of these Auto Shapes, including a BurstAutoShape. On the BurstAutoShape ,the number of points has been specified, the size and it’s set to invert, giving the appearance of a flower. And, just like any other geometry in Degrafa, you can apply fills, strokes, transforms, decorators, etc. to make all kinds of cool stuff with very minimal code.

For now, you can access the first group of AutoShapes in the Origin branch of the Degrafa SVN. We will be continually adding more and encourage others to create and contribute their own. For those who end up using them, we’re open to any feedback you might have.

If you’re interested in Degrafa and live in Southern California, you should probably check out Flex Camp Orange County. Tom Gonzalez and I (Juan Sanchez) will be giving a presentation on Degrafa.

A lot of new features have come along up to the latest release, Beta 3.1, and with the sessions being 40 minutes there’s no way we can fit them all in. So, aside from just mentioning here that we’re presenting, we’d also like to get some people who are thinking of attending what they’d like to hear about.

We definitely have to give an overview of the framework and walk through some introductory code, but beyond that is what we’d like to fill in. We’ve had thoughts on just covering the “top 10″ features of Degrafa, or maybe the “top 5″ use cases for Degrafa. There’s tons of examples to show along with anything we decide to talk about.

So, if you’re thinking of attending Flex Camp OC, what would you like to hear about?

Get more info about Flex Camp Orange County