Here, have a 3D tarantula to play with....



It's an interesting Flash 3D demo, and someone's put a lot of work into building an interactive model of a spider.

It seems to make a good cat toy on a multi-monitor set up - and it's the first application I've seen the cats here pay attention to!

While researching a piece on Apollo I came across Adobe's Kuler.

Built to demonstrate the capabilities of the latest versions of Flash and Flex, it's a web-based version of the extremely useful colour space explorer tools in Illustrator CS3 - with an added dose of community. Use the colour space explorer to choose a set of colours, then use rules to find complementary sets, or the appropriate colour triads, or even related shades to a base colour. It's an excellent tool for building colour maps that you can use in your web sites or desktop applications - you can take the RGB values of the colours you choose, or the hex.

What's even neater though, is the community, where people are sharing the colour sets and themes they've defined. A voting system lets you say which themes you liked the most - I'm particularly fond of Japanese Garden...

There are also RSS feeds of the most popular colour themes - so you can stay updated without having to visit the site every day - and OS X users get a Kuler dashboard widget.

An excellent tool for web and graphic designers.

Here's my latest piece for El Reg, looking at Adobe's Apollo by actually installing and working with the development tools. A quick summary: it's definitely early beta, with lots of pieces missing, but rather promising.

There was a bit of a buzz in the air on Monday when Adobe rolled out the first public alpha release of its Apollo desktop internet application client – along with a whole truckload of developer tools and documentation.

Apollo is an interesting proposition, a platform that mixes Flash (though you do need to use code that's written to use ActionScript 3.0 and the new AVM 2.0 virtual machine), PDF, and HTML. The Apollo runtime is a host for .air applications and is built on code that mixes Adobe's Acrobat Reader, the Flash 9 Player, and a standards-compliant HTML rendering engine based on Apple's WebKit.

The main difference between the Apollo runtime and all these components running in, say, WebKit browsers like Safari or Swift, is that there's no browser window and that the application gets direct access to your hard disk. It can read and write files, as well as using persistent storage. It even gets access to some of your hardware – so you can use Apollo to work with images from a web cam. In fact, there's already a demonstration application that mimics Apple's Photo Booth webcam tool.

So what's the developer experience like?

The good news is that Adobe has learnt the lesson of Macromedia's Central, and has given developers several different routes to building applications – without locking you into someone else's business model.

Read More.

Dodge.

Touch the blue square with the blue circle. Avoid the red dots that are created with each touch.

Starts simple, but quickly gets very, very tricky. Oh, and addictive...

For your Friday afternoon delectations:

A rather delightful (if somewhat violent) little Flash animation showing just what goes on on your PC's screen when you're away.

The moral? Be careful just what games you install...

A rather nifty Flash animation (from the website of the book of the same name) that explores just what the author believes the various dimensions mean, as it takes us through the first to tenth dimensions.

Click on the navigation tab to explore the animation. Lots of nifty time travel ideas in linking the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions. It's origami turtles all the way down...
Link via Amygdalaf

Remember Samorost, that addictive little Flash puzzle game?

Well, now there's a sequel. This time, alas, you have to buy it to complete the whole thing. But still, you get one chapter to play with...

...means you've found your way to the joy of Ant Kendo

More mini-Flash gaming to eat your day