Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category
RoboBrawl
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.
Minuit
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/
Yahoo Releases ASTRA:
ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications
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!
Nice Site… by Microsoft?
So you're telling me there's a Microsoft site out there that is clean, simple, creative, AND playful? Is the universe ripping apart at the seams? But I guess they only get partial credit because the site is targeting Mac users.
Ultrashock Flexed
The Ultrashock community has been a big inspiration for me over the years. I haven't spent as much time on their site lately, but I used to really enjoy reading through their forums.
A site upgrade may have been long overdue, but they have certainly outdone themselves this time around. They have hooked up one of the sweetest Flex sites I have seen. I'm not sure how practical this type of implementation is (especially in regards to search engine compatibility), but it sure looks cool :). It also looks like they have earned an FWA site of the day. Nice!
RIA 2008 Forecast
I follow Ryan Stewart's blog. He is well versed in Flex and other RIA technologies, and is employed at Adobe as an RIA Evangelist. His opinions are generally not heavily weighted in Adobe's favor. There were no big surprises here, but it's nice to know that we're moving the right direction.
His post on RIA predictions for 2008 is worth reading...
Ryan Stewart: Rich Internet application predictions for 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=699
Here is another good (and very relevant) forecast article:
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=157
Pocket Geek
http://www.thepocketgeek.com/
Pretty interesting Flash game/site which seems to fall in with "The Sims" or one of those virtual pet-type websites. It's a fun idea, but the audio gets annoying real quick so you'll probably want to toggle it off.