If I was going to be at Flash on the Beach, you’d be able to find me at Twentyfour, a new “fully interactive” bar in London. Whenever I can combine a great user experience with drinking, good things are bound to happen.

The walls in Twentyfour are all interactive so you can control the scenery for the room you’re in and supposedly even contribute. The website shows the matrix them, some orange thing and a picture of the desert (which is awesome). Supposedly the walls even react when you do things like hold up your drink or touch them. All of this sounds terribly dangerous in a place where alcohol is being served, but that could make it all the more interesting.

[Via Crave]

Larry Dignan just blogged about Visualforce, a new initiative by Salesforce.com meant to give customers using the Salesforce.com platform more control over the user interface and design side of their applications. As a developer, you can edit the code for your Salesforce.com application on the fly and change the user interface to suit your needs. Larry has a good gallery that shows what can be changed and how users can really streamline the experience on their own.

According to Larry, you can build these interfaces using HTML, Ajax and (wait for it), Flex. Salesforce.com released the Flex Toolkit a while back as part of their Apex Developer Network so it’s cool to see that they’re also supporting use for it in this new product.

User interfaces are becoming more and more important, and everyone is starting to realize that. The fact that a company like Salesforce.com is stepping up and really empowering designers and developers by giving them full control over the user experience is great. I can’t wait to see what happens with this.

[tags]Flex, Salesforce.com, VisualForce[/tags]

I’m a topo map nut and it’s been kind of hard to watch the explosion in mapping on the web happen while Topo maps have been left behind. There is Topo.com which is a pay site and one of my favorite Flex applications, Trailtracer, but nothing in the main stream. That may change however because of Yahoo’s new product, MapMixer.

As a number of people are reporting, MapMixer came out of a Yahoo Hack Day and has made its way into the family of Yahoo products. Even though these aren’t Flash-based maps, I still really like this idea. Basically you can upload any map you want and it will have all the functionality of regular Yahoo maps. You can layer it right on top of the existing map so that your new map actually has a sense of where it belongs. There are some really interesting use cases for this and already someone has uploaded a hiking map from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Kudos to Yahoo and I hope we see more RIA mashups like this.

[tags]Yahoo, MapMixer, Topo Maps[/tags]

I’ve started using Dopplr pretty extensively as I plan my trips and wanted to throw a quick shout out in case anyone wanted an invite. Basically Dopplr allows you to tell it about all of your trips and then you can follow other people’s trips to see if you’ll be in the same place at the same time. You can also set a home base (mine is Seattle) so if anyone is passing through, you’ll see that I’m here at home and we can grab beers or something.

It’s been a fun service and I think it’s valuable even for people that don’t do a lot of traveling. So if you’re interested in getting an invite, just leave a comment below or send me an email and I’ll get you one. I’ve got unlimited invites and I’d LOVE to have more people from the Adobe community on here. If you’re already there, share your trips so I can see where you are.

[tags]Dopplr, Traveling, Personal[/tags]

There’s an interesting report from Google Operating System that Google is thinking about using rich media ads alongside search results. Marissa Mayer believes that as the results you get back are richer, the actual advertising should follow suit, which I think is a good idea. The web is becoming a richer place and that is driven by users. If Google can monetize that then it will encourage that “rich ecosystem”.

Google Operating System had a good example:

At the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York, Nicholas Fox from Google gave an example of video ad for a local butcher that would work better than a standard text ad: “a video with shots of fresh meat and the overall store experience”. He also assured us that Google will be careful about user experience and the new ads will be placed only if they’re really relevant.

The stakes for video on the web continue to get higher and higher and I feel pretty confident that Adobe is in a great spot.

[tags]Google, Web Video, Rich Media, Advertising[/tags]

What a cool idea. Matt Casto is doing a “30 day Silverlight Sprint” in which he takes 30 days to learn about Silverlight. That’s great but the best part is that he’s blogging the whole process. He talks about the resources he’s using/finding, the pitfalls, the pleasant surprises – everything. I think it captures a lot of great information for any RIA developer. I’d love to see someone do this for Flex and document the same kinds of things. Matt is a .NET developer so that was also really cool perspective. It would be neat to have the same 30 day Flex sprint with developers from different backgrounds.

Follow along:
Day 1
Day 2
Days 3-6
Day 7
Days 8-11
Days 12-13

[tags]Silverlight, Development[/tags]