The team at Advanced Flash Components have created a universal mapping component that allows Flex developers to easily incorporate mapping components from any provider, including Google Maps. Flex developers who have wanted to incorporate Google Maps into their apps can now do so by leveraging the work that's gone into this component.

The component is still in beta (0.5) and is available as a free download.

RIA developers might want to subscribe to the Advanced Flash Components blog for updates on this and other cool components that they've built.

Yahoo has released a set of Flash and Flex components for rich Internet applications. "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." The Flash components include an alert manager, audio playback and a menu bar. The Flex components include colour pickers, an autocomplete manager, time input and more.

Via Ryan Stewart. More details at the Y! Flash blog.

Ely Greenfield has a number of cool Flex demos on his website, but perhaps the coolest one is the FlexBook component that he released the other day. I was talking to James Ward today about it, and I thought the component was cool, but was blown out of the water when James directed me to the Anatomy book version of it.

Take a look at the above photo. There's a whole lot there to admire, but perhaps the most amazing thing is transparency on the page that's being turned.

I'm not in medical school, but I'm told that this component looks pretty much like the real thing.