Cover Flow is an excellent way to display a lot of content, particularly product content, in a small space. It has been implemented in many different ways by web and software developers alike. Apple purchased Cover Flow in 2006, and the Wikipedia entry for it states:
"Cover Flow is an animated, three dimensional graphical user interface integrated within iTunes, the Macintosh Finder, and other Apple Inc. products for visually flipping through snapshots of documents, website bookmarks, album artwork, or photographs."
But Cover Flow has more uses than that, and in this three-part tutorial series, I’ll build a Cover Flow sample using Papervision3D, GTween and XML. The project will consist of three classes: the Coverflow class, which is the main class and will do all the heavy lifting; the CoverflowItem class, which will handle the basic functionality of each item; and the CoverflowEvent class, which will be dispatched each time an item receives focus.
In this first installment, I'll work on the Coverflow class, load the XML and create the CoverflowItem class.
