Digg has released a Flash API for accessing their content. The API was created by Stamen Design which is the company responsible for the cool visualizations on Digg Labs.

I’m not sure yet whether the Flash API works directly with Flex, since it’s written in ActionScript 2. However, in looking through the API, I think you may not need the Flash toolkit at all within Flex, since the “standard” API is accessed through HTTP and XML, which is built into Flex.

Does anyone know more about the Digg Flash API? Do you need it for Flex? I happen to know one of the founders of Stamen from my DJ days, so I’ll be asking him as well.

The New York Times has an interesting interactive piece that helps you visualize where the money is coming from in the upcoming 2008 presidential race.

What I like about this chart is that the animations really help your eye track the differences in geographical support as you click between the various candidates. Check it out!

A couple people have written asking what has been up with me. Well, I became a father (again), and that has been taking a lot of time. I’m starting to come up for air, so I’ll hopefully be posting more again. Stay tuned!

I had an odd thought earlier today after reading some news about a Yahoo project that brings the concept of Unix pipes to the Web.

A lot of the value of HTML is that it is a machine-readable format. This is the reason why we all care about “separating content form presentation”, right? Microformats takes that to the next level, as does RSS and other XML-based approaches to structuring content.

IMHO, this whole movement toward more machine readable web formats is one of the most exciting things happening right now. Now how does Flex factor in?

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Why is it that so many of us make Flex applications that look like this:

I mean.. The default look for Flex applications looks fine, but it’s kind of like making an HTML app that looks like this:

I suppose the answer is that many of the folks playing around with Flex these days are developers, but that doesn’t mean we have to settle. I think there are two factors at play here:

1. The default HTML look is pretty ugly, which forces you to look for an alternative.
2. HTML has been around for longer, so more people know the tricks you need to know to change its look.

To counteract this inertia, maybe we should have made the default Flex look be an obviously non-production look, like Elyon’s napkin skin (which is wonderful, BTW. Yes, that is a real screenshot of a working datagrid) In a funny way, this would have forced people to develop their own look while at the same time opening people’s eyes up to the vast styling possibilities of Flex… Hm…..