Next week, we’ll be launching a new library of Flash components on the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center. Expect to see a nice redesign of the site and all sorts of open source goodness. We’re also building up a ton of articles to post over the coming months. I’m giving some of my own blog posts a more formal rewrite (better editing, new content, and more), and we’ll have original articles too. In short, we’re looking to provide a lot of cool, free stuff in very the near future.

I think Yahoo! got a really good opportunity to benefit from the Flash nature of Yahoo Maps, allowing developer closely integrate them into applications. Google doesn’t provide such API for Flash: a lot of experiments were made, but each time Flash was used just as overlay above the Google Maps, like in the NYC Subway Flash Overlay for Google Maps and in Christophe Coenraets experiment on Google Maps Collaboration using Flex, Flash Media Server and Ajax.

So Yahoo seems to be a step forward toward the close integration of maps and flash front-end; however, they still don’t allow Flash developers to operate with raw map image data, or BitmapData in Flash Player terminology.

Yahoo! Flash Platform Team announcement brings a new hope that such issues will be discussed and resolved effectively.

Thanks Ryan.
ciao
marco