Mark Anders from Adobe gave a preview of Thermo and Flash Player 10 at the 360|Flex conference. It’s a good video for designers interested in Flex-based RIA UI development and for Flex programmers interested in what’s on the horizon for designer/developer collaboration.

For those not familiar with Microsoft Photosynth, and even for those who are, the following video might knock your socks off.

Hilarious and astoundingly accurate map of the brain of a web developer.

http://mingle2.com/blog/view/web-developer-mind

Love the “deprecated brainmeats” callout.

Grant Skinner and his team have created a new tweening engine for AS3 that, in his words, better fit the needs of his team. And may fit yours better, too - it’s at least worth checking out.

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/gtween_a_new_tw.html

Aspects that look interesting to me: the Proxy tweening feature, the timeInterval and timingMode (frame, time, or hybrid) properties, sequencing tweens and synchronizing tweens. All in only 4.5 K.

Once I get a chance to do some experiments with gTween, I’ll update this post.

From their FAQ:
pptPlex is a research prototype developed by Microsoft Office Labs as an exploration of an alternative method of presenting Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 slides. This plug-in allows you to arrange slides on a canvas then zoom between the slides during the presentation. You can move around the canvas and show groups of slides, individual slides, or even zoom in to show a particular section of a slide.

pptPlex is based on the Plex technology demoed by Bill Gates in the TouchWall at the Microsoft CEO Summit 2008 (also developed by Microsoft Office Labs).

Videos available here:
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx

Ryan Lanciaux, a .NET developer and friend of mine, has created a JavaScript-based Visual Studio theme generator. Use it to create great looking color schemes for viewing and editing code in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.

http://www.frickinsweet.com/tools/Theme.mvc.aspx

Adaptive Path (including Jesse James Garret, who coined the now-ubiquitous term “AJAX") and Mozilla have been putting together Aurora, their vision of what the landscape of web browsing in the future could look like.

I think the radial menus look like an interesting concept - although their behavior probably needs to be fleshed out better to be to be used rapidly by most users. It’s probably more of an advanced user feature - the 3D modeling and animation software Maya has had radial menus for years, which makes sense for that demographic, but hasn’t really caught on in other areas.

The woman in the demo video is able to change her focus quickly using a three-dimensional “spatial” view of open “web pages”. Along with that, one feature that looks incredibly useful is the highlighted contextual grouping of pages and other elements in this 3D view.

See the video for part 1 below.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Via DrawLogic

Until you’re the next contestant on The Price is Right, you can play a Flash version of the brilliantly simple yet fun game Plinko. Plinko uses ActionScript 3 and the 2D ActionScript Physics Engine (APE).

Play the game: http://client.drawcode.com/em-plinko/
Learn more about APE: http://www.cove.org/ape/

One annoyance for me when it came to the iPhone 3G was its inability to be tethered with a laptop to provide an internet connection when out of range of WiFi. Nullriver’s NetShare is the game changer in that department.

iTunes App Store link: NetShare

Read about it on Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/01/netshare

Delicious (a Yahoo! property, formerly del.icio.us), is a handy way to collect and share links online. For awhile now they’ve been working quietly on a redesign, which finally launched today. And it’s beautiful, with more social Digg-like features and a terrific looking UI. Really digging that flexible, rotating JavaScript banner on the homescreen, too.

Read the development team’s blog entry for the launch: http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/07/oh-happy-day.html
Synopsis of new features: http://delicious.com/help/whatsnew

Check out the new Delicious at http://delicious.com