http://robobrawl.com/

This little gem definitely takes the cake as “site of the month.” RoboBrawl, promotional minisite for Intel Xeon, is very well executed on so many fronts - user experience, design, illustration, typography, animation, usability, sound, music… it’s the total package. Build a robot, fight in matches, upgrade your weapons, and challenge friends to a full-on cage match. It’s hard to hide the man-crush I have for this site.

Apparently there’s this thing called Google, and you can just type in what you’re looking for and it finds it.

Amazing, eh?

Hence, I found another tool. It’s called Pixel Ruler. Take a guess what it does.

I just found a tool we all will probably find valuable. It’s called Virtual Magnifying Glass. It basically allows you to bind a hotkey to transform your mouse into a magnifying glass. If you’re like me, you’re constantly squinting to assess some tiny graphic flaw, and then you may end up taking a screenshot into Photoshop and zooming in several times to be sure. This tool eliminates the need for that.

This is something that I’ve heard come up a lot in conversation and in a lot of different places across the web. Lee Brimlow brings up some interesting points in an article worth reading over at
The Flash Blog. Check it out. Flash is Not a Stepping Stone!

I have worked some with the AS2 Yahoo! maps components, and the AS2 version integrated pretty well with Flex, but I have been anxiously waiting for an AS3 version.

With only a couple of lines of code, literally, you can get their mapping component working in your own Flex app…

Check it out here:
Yahoo! Maps AS3

MINUIT
http://www.minuit.co.nz/
Cool site. I love the illustrative style and the game-like play. The overall concept reminds me a lot of Red Interactive, which is an awesome site. It was launched about a year ago, but since then they’ve added several extras.

RED INTERACTIVE
http://www.ff0000.com/

The ASTRA website (Yahoo/Flash Developer Center) sums it up best:

ASTRA, the ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications, is a collection of Flash and Flex components, code libraries, toolkits and utilties developed by Yahoo! for ActionScript developers. These libraries available under the terms of the open source BSD license.

Yahoo has built components that are available for Flex 3 AND Flash CS3. The components are well documented, and they appear to be easily skinnable. Great work Yahoo!

What designer hasn’t poured their heart and soul into a project only to have it bastardized by some corporate suit? Well since it’s Friday, I decided to post a few funny, designer-related links that have been passed to me over the last couple of months… all of which make me feel better after a “creatively challenging” week.

Make the Logo Bigger
http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/003259.html

Make My Logo Bigger Creme

Microsoft Designs the iPod Package