One of the most common post topics on the Adobe Flash User Forums is a request for tutorial recommendations. Well, here ya go! Great tutorials and it FREE!

IFBIN.com just opened their service to the public for free. It is a client that you need to download and install that allows you to browse and download the Flash By Example and Flex By Example code/tutorial libraries. Great stuff!

The current IFBIN.com site is a little sketchy on the details, but the FREE message is loud and clear. You can read Darron Schall's (one of the contributors) description of the service here.

IFBIN is the brainchild of Adobe Flex Evangelist Ted Patrick. Originally, a subscription service, the move to a FREE model is a little confusing, but it's certainly not time to look a gift horse in the mouth!

Geek Cocktail Party Bonus: What's better than throwing around alphabet-soup acronyms? Knowing what the mean. Check here to lean what IFBIN really stands for!

MDM Multimedia is celebrating its fourth birthday by hosting a Flash contest...actually TWO contests. They've set it up as a Designer Vs. Developer contest, but that's really not the case. It's really two different contests: one for designers and one for developers (a distinction that I've never really liked...I know that there has to be some division of duties in a business workflow, but the implication that a designer is the "creative" person and the developer is the "technical" person just doesn't sit right with me, nor has it ever been that clean-cut in my experience...end rant...).

The designer contest is for a marketing campaign and the developer contest is more application oriented. The new version of MDM's Zinc supports Flash Player 9, AS3 and Flex 2, so the idea that you didn't use for the Flex Derby would be a great fit here.

The prize packages top out around $1,000 worth of goodies, so take a look-see and show 'em your stuff!

Our sister site, Ad-Jab, blogged about this site yesterday. Brawney Academy is an advertising site for Georgia Pacific's Brawney Paper Towels. Under the auspices of a reality show, our host, "Brawney Man," leads eight manly men through some sort of outdoor sensitivity training. Only the first of what looks to be eight video episodes has been posted so far, but lots of other stuff to do on the site including your own training in manly sensitivity. If you work at it, you too could attain the Brawney Academy goal by becoming  "[d]ependable and strong, but caring"...and thus, like the Brawney Man himself, "a literal human representation of the paper towel's qualities."

Not too sure about the whole reality series concept, but I like the site design. The combination of photo-realistic elements and retro graphics is worthy of a Disney Imagineer.

[via Ad-Jab]

Adobe is sponsoring a Developer Week (12-16 June). This is a free series of online presos aimed at developers. Lots of Flex stuff, an overview of the Adobe Engagement Platform, and AS 3.0 for Flash developers (in case you haven't started exploring AS3 in Flex). If you haven't had a chance to play around with Flex, this would be a good place to get an introduction so you know what's coming on deck.

Looks like there's some good information to be had here...and its FREE! So go sign up today.

Regular readers know that I live in New Orleans. It's been nine months since Hurricane Katrina and the failings of our levee system laid waste to my home town. Even now, we're still dealing with the after effects. At least I'm one of the lucky ones. I get to live in my own house. Too many of my fellow citizens can't say the same.

The online version of the New Orleans Times-Picayune published an animated Flash map this week that show how the city was flooded during the course of August 29th. Now, this animation won't blow your socks off for its aesthetics (I could have done without the sound effects, especially in the continuous animation version) or its interactivity, but it might blow your mind when you see just how much of New Orleans took on water. Staff artist, Dan Swenson, did a great job using Flash to show the tragedy of events unfold over time. Sometimes I think we...I know I do personally...get caught up in the coolness factor of Flash. Swenson reminds us that you don't have to be flashy to use Flash as a great communication tool.

Seems like building Flash explorer-type apps is the new black! A few weeks back, we had the Transition & Tween Explorer. Now we have a Flash Gradient Explorer. Maybe the Flex Explorer and the Flex Style Explorer (warning: needs Flash Player 8.5....AKA 9) have just inspired folks to build this type of thing! And the rest of us get the benefits!

Check out Kinglong's Gradient Explorer! (The link is directly to the SWF file. If you'd can read Chinese or want to use Babelfish on Kinglong's post about the project, go here.) It's a great way to experience how code works in real time. See how and where the little numbers change the way things look instead of just playing around with sliders...and you can always cut and paste the code into your own Flash movies too!

[via Peter Baird]

Finally someone has taken our advice and started displaying premium content via Flash video with embedded ads. As I have said in this space before, content providers need only create Flash based video content to distribute their stuff to viewers and then they can grab the largest online viewing audience of any video app. Larger than Windows Media Player, larger than Quicktime, larger than all other video types.

ABC has created and released a new Flash based video player for four of its shows that embeds video with non-skippable ad content from AT&T. Users can choose from four differenct shows (Desperate Housewives, Lost, Commander and Chief, and Alias) and view content in each with sponsor advertisments within.

Screenshots and more after the jump.

Yahoo! Yippee! Etc! Yahoo has just released two new APIs for its mapping service. Web developers can use the new Yahoo Maps AJAX API and the Yahoo Maps Flash API to create their own Yahoo maps in any web-based (or just web connected) application. Now Neave will need to roll the Yahoo info into his Flash map. The API includes hooks for other live data from Yahoo sources like their trakkic tracker and more. Plus the Flash API comes in a Flex flavor for RIA developers looking to roll maps and live data into their applications. I would like to see this added to a live pizza ordering application that shows a highlighted delivery route and availability map that allows a user to click on their house and even draw out a map. Heck, while we're thinking of map drawing, let's create an interactive app that multiple users can log into at the same time and watch a leader draw a live route on the map (with notes) to give directions to a meeting (or something).

NewsForge wrote up a quite PHP tutorial for displaying charts using the PHP/SWF Chart package from Maani. They take a few W3Schools stats and generate some easy to use PHP code for quick insertion and even quicker modification for your site. The charting package they use is an alternative to Flex for interactive chart creation and is a good package for individual sites that may want to avoid a lot of code, but I think developers benefit from the use of these kind of packages to get started if they plan on a stop gap solution only. These packages are good for an easy site throw up, but Flash developers and even some regular coders should really take a long hard look into Flex before building a site around this solution. If you don't want to learn Flex or ActionScript then stick with this solution otherwise take the chance and jump into Flex.

Just got a Monk-e-Mail from a friend! Of course, I couldn't resist sending one back...and maybe to a few other friends, too...

CareerBuilder.com has taken their monkey-themed advertising campaign (which I find amusing) to the web with this Flash application. You can build your own Monk-e-Mail and send it to all of your friends too! You might want to wait till Friday for this though...may be too disruptive for your workday otherwise as Monk-e-Mails fly about the office.

On a slightly different note, has anyone noticed how popular text-to-speech applications have become in the last few months!

[thanks to Lee for making my day]

Following off of my post yesterday about Jumpcut, I'll throw this one out there too. Chevrolet has a Flash site in support of the new Chevy Tahoe where you can make your own commercial and save it on their site. Similar idea to Jumpcut if not as full-featured...and of course, Chevy is supplying most of the content... You can start to see a convergence of ideas around how Flash can be used on the web. I think the word about the "Flash Platform" is starting to sink in...

It's interesting how folks are already subverting the Chevy application. Check out the videos: C.I.C.L.E.'s here and Rocketboom's here.

[via C.I.C.L.E.]

This is very cool! Video editing on the web, complete with effects and transitions, in a Flash-based application! Jumpcut is taking the services provided by Google Video and YouTube up a notch by giving users the tools to create as well as the tools to post and share. You can even remix a video you find there and repost it. And its all written in Flash! So we have the wedding of Flash as a tool for interactive environments with Flash as a tool for content delivery (video).

Really great stuff! Check out my current favorite video up on Jumpcut here. Definitely some future internet stars here!

[via Campbell Anderson]

I love it when technologies that some were comparing as adversaries come together to make cool stuff. Not too long ago, the developer blogosphere was abuzz wondering how Flash and AJAX could exist in the same universe. Luckily, that argument didn't last too long and some creative folks started thinking about how they could play together and make great web experiences.

Christophe Coenraets is one of those people and he's made a really interesting example using Flex, AJAX, and Flash Media Server. Christophe's Google maps collaboration app shows just how the web is growing, from display technology to collaboration technology. I'm still a little skeptical about the whole Web 2.0 thing, but there's something to be said about using great technologies to enable people to communicate better.

Keep an eye out, I think we're going to see more of this stuff coming out in the near future.

I think I've said here before that I'm a big cycling fan. Recently, I've really been enjoying the ramblings of a couple of Aussies ("Bazzman" and "Hutch") on the Cycling Insight podcast. In this week's podcast, they pointed out the LAS Helmets site. Their comments were more about the helmets themselves, but I have to say, I kind of like the site itself. Sometimes there a little too much going on on the screen and the photo gallery bit isn't always intuitive, but I like the little pods. Make sure you click and move them about. The nice use of alpha transparency gives it a really slick look.

Take a look and let me know what you think!

Yesterday Google debuted its new Finance page and today I got a chance to browser the app for a while. Google Finance promently features a Flash based live ticker for any stock and includes a zooming interface on that ticker to display financial data for the last three years. A list of news stories (found by Google News, of course) is displayed along side the ticker and is even linked within the data at various points to relate the news to the stock. I can see this as a developing application meant to compete with the likes of E-Trade for portfolio display via Flash (though E-trade's Flash RIA is a lot more complex and integrates buying and selling). I would like an API though so I could integrate the data and ready made charts into various sites. This would be great for internal live stock and market trackers for major organizations. Want to see how the world views your company? Just keep it on your homepage.

Read more about Google Finance around the web: Mike Downey links to Adobe's stats, Paul Kedrosky wants more and suspects this is a Flash demo (he doesn't see the AJAX-i-ness that lovingly integrates with the Flash fun, I guess), JD points to the Flash charting and notices the XmlHttpRequest to connect to the headlines, TechCrunch gives its usual run down with links to what the Web 2.0ers think, our Blog-daddy Jason Calacanis thinks it is no Yahoo and wants to know why more sites don't implement Flash this cleanly (me too), and our blog-sibling The Unofficial Google Weblog sees this beta as a good move that will possibly beat out Yahoo's offerring (guess he doesn't agree with Jason).