Hindsight really is 20 / 20, and in the case of this application from the team at Stamen design (creators of the Digg visualizations and this real time cab mapping application), its also beautfiul. They've created a Flash application that shows you how neighborhoods have changed over the years, by mashing up housing information onto an online mapping system, and adding in time as another dimension to the visualization. The result is a beautiful time lapse image that shows how certain neighborhoods have been built up over the years.

There are a number of points over at O'Reilly on why they used Flash for this particular application, but the one that most caught my eye was this statement: "The use of Flash 9 specifically means we can throw around *much* more data than is currently possible with AJAX approaches (thousands of points in real-time - none of the data is pre-rendered)". That's the main reason that I think we (Adobe) will be the leaders in RIA development for years to come. I explained it to new hires at sales training this way...

Flash Player 8 added in a new video codec, and really started the online video revolution. The focus for Flash Player 8 was the new video codec, and the team obviously had a goal for enabling online video. The rest (YouTube) is history. Flash Player 9 does that same thing for RIAs. The new virtual machine in Flash Player 9 was rewritten specifically to handle large amounts of data that you'll find in RIAs like the Hindsight application. Over the next two years, similar to the timing for online video, you'll see a number of great applications take advantage of that new VM, and the huge speed increase. That's why I think Flash will win in the RIA market - Flash Player 9 is for RIAs as Flash Player 8 is for online video.

Getting back to the the app, it was built for Trulia, a real estate search portal, who also have a cool Ajax based heat map (is that an oxymoron?) that shows how hot a certain location's real estate market is.

Via the O'Reilly blog, and an email from Derek Wischusen. Visit Derek's site if you're interested in more information about Ruby on Rails and Flex working together.