The Art of Scrolling Challenge

Question

Good morning ppl,
A while back I was working on creating a scrollbarless sliding thumbnail list. I scoured the net and couldn't find anything -- anything free that is. All I found were sites selling products (minus source files of course). Ridiculous! So I ended up coding a component myself, but it was never quite satisfactory.
So I'm turning to you all, because this is really a problem that should be freely available to the community and I know we have some good coders about.
I spent all yesterday (and the better part of the night/morning) working on this app. It's an app that will hopefully encourage you to participate.
The objective is to write small class file, which extends AbstractScrollingAlgo. There is a scrollMe() method which you will need to override. Basically in the main app, scrollMe() is called every time you mouse over the list. Once you mouse over the list, everything you could possibly need to know to achieve a cool scrolling effect will be available to you. You simply need to animate the hScroller::value in some wickedly awesome way.
Once you have coded the algo subclass, you will need to add an instance of this to the main app (place it in the "listOfScrollingAlgos" array collection). I have already kick-started this off with FollowMeAlgo.mxml (your class should be similar to this -- easy!).
Hopefully, we'll get a few ppl working on this and in a few days we can put all the algos into one swf and vote on the winner.
Lastly, a few more q's:
1 pat-yourself-on-the-back pt if you can name the design pattern used to change the scrolling behavior at RT.
2 karma pts if you can explain to me why virtualLayout is messing with my color scheme.
5 karma pts if can criticize my code and suggest how I could make it more efficient (this app has some serious flaws!!).
and 5 more karma pts if you participate and send in a working class.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend and send in those algos!!
- e

Answer 1

Ok, an update (for anybody interested).
I've added a wings and externalHScrollBar property to the the base class of all scrolling algorithm classes. So this should provide for more than enough scrolling variations I've ever seen on the net.
There are also two new algo classes: wings and wingsII, which you can see in the swf file.
There's a lot to do. A few ideas rolling around my head are:
iphone pull/stretch effect, where you can stretch the slider past minimum/maximum values and see white space; bounces back when pulled too far.
iphone toss effect. cast the scroller and the motion is continued after mouse is released.
infinity. list cycles in an infinite loop.
wingsIII variation with some kind of acceleration (and capped velocity).
Center-based acceleration. (See David's comments above)
Today scroll effect (see here)
better variations of "follow me" (see here, here and here)
Some effects are fairly simple and I'm hoping to be able to leverage some of the new animation effects (motion paths etc) but don't have a lot of advanced examples to work off. I briefly looked in the SDK earlier at the button_buttonDownHandler from spark.components.supportClasses and I can tell you that getting the scroller to function smoothly is not always trivial!! Saw some of Chet Haase's work in there, maybe he has some ideas for me?? Will be pouring over the SDK more thoroughly tomorrow.
In the mean time, here is the working swf and source files I have:
http://moothink.com/queue_schmueue/TheArtOfScrolling.zip (in case the file doesn't attach properly below...)
As always comments, ideas, code are welcome. Thanks,
- e