O’Reilly: Inside RIA

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

In this excerpt from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn how to place visual content on screen, then rearrange, remove, and manage it with code. Guest-star appearance by Adobe engineer Jim Corbett, the creator of ActionScript's display API.

No, this isn't my new perspective on using the Google Maps API. In fact, it's much more exciting. Google recently released a new addition to the Maps API for Flash, including 3D perspective, and a new control set that is reminiscent of the controls in Google Earth! Straight from Google: "With a perspective map, the map is projected on a viewport (the screen) using a virtual point of reference in front of the screen (the camera). These three components (the map, the viewport and the camera) form a perspective on the viewport which gives the illusion of depth perception to the map."

Welcome back to our series. We will continue to work on components that will help us develop facebook applications faster and with less bugs. There is one quite useful component that will will be used throughout the facebook development and that's the MultiFriend Selection Component. There is already one developed by facebook and is displayed when using standard FBML.

This excerpt is from Twitter API: Up and Running. This groundbreaking book provides you with the skills and resources you need to build web applications for Twitter. Perfect for new and casual programmers intrigued by the microblogging, Twitter API:...

In the last article we worked extensively with the ProfilePic component and showed how the component can be used in real time scenarios. We had an interesting example of a real word application with the "Would you..." application clone. I really had a lot of fun working on it and hope you too. For us it's important that we were able to work with components that where previously build based on the previous articles. The goal is not to hurt the "DRY“ principle, which means "Don't repeat your self". Every component that was created needs to reused again so no development time will be spent on them anymore, except when extending it. This tutorial will deal mostly with text. The idea of the application is the following: We need to create some sort of "Mood Checker", an application that will allow us to browse through the statuses of users.

This excerpt is from Twitter API: Up and Running. This groundbreaking book provides you with the skills and resources you need to build web applications for Twitter. Perfect for new and casual programmers intrigued by the microblogging, Twitter API:...

Excerpted from Chapter 18 of the Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook. Mashup applications are based on the possibility of consuming remote data sources, and to create one, you need a good understanding of the APIs available. AIR offers even greater possibilities for creating mashup applications and widgets. With AIR, you can go beyond all the sandbox security of the browser and add advanced features to the application to interact with the file system or local storage with SQLite. This chapter demonstrates how to integrate the Flickr, Yahoo Maps, and Twitter web services to create desktop mashup applications with AIR.

Since I discovered Twitterfall.com, I've become addicted to the site's constant stream of Twitter updates. The site works on a basic premise. Enter few search terms, and a 'waterfall' of matching tweets will slowly scroll down the screen. It is...

This post is for anyone who has found themselves in the situation where they have an existing Flash component that they can't embed in their Flash/Flex application, although they still want/need to use them together.

Lots of news today, First JavaFX, now Google. Google Earth, and the Google Earth browser API are now supported on Macs.

Back in June, Google released the Google Earth API, which is a javascript-enabled browser plugin version of Google Earth. I finally got a chance to explore the Google Earth API, and here's the result.

Yesterday, Google released the Google Earth API. This is basically a browser plugin for Google Earth. I have to admit, I was blown away when I saw it in action. Microsoft Virtual Earth beat Google to it with web based 3d maps, but Google is going to give them a run for their money.

Yep, thats right... Google has released a Flash/AS3 API for Google Maps, and yes, it works with Flex. I'm very glad to see the Google Maps team take this step, and provide a supported API for their maps interface.

Web map has become an important utility of our daily life. We use it to plan a trip for directions, we use it to virtually walk around a city in 3D, we use it to find an apartment or a house from map mashup applications and so on. What if we want to ask more complicate questions to the web map, questions such as "How many Starbucks stores within 5 miles range of a dream house I can't take my eyes off, and I can drive to some of those stores in 3 minutes from the dream house?" Obviously for questions like this, merely putting markers/push-pins on the map is not enough.