Yahoo has released an ActionScript 3.0 API for Yahoo Maps. This is one of the most requested features from Flex developers. Ted Patrick has more information on the release. If you're interested in developing with this new API, check out the Yahoo Maps Flash developer center page, which includes the code, examples, and screencasts.

Life is funny sometimes. For instance, this morning I blogged about Doug McCune's recent data visualization work, and then a few hours later David Mendels sent out an email about a new toolkit that was released last week to help developers with data visualization. The Flare Visualization Toolkit is "a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more."

The demo is impressive, but perhaps even more impressive is that Flare is based on a Java library called Prefuse. Its great to see Java libraries are being ported over to ActionScript 3 libraries as part of the same project (or at least the same domain).

The team at Natural User Interface is working on an ActionScript 3 platform for tabletop applications, similar to Microsoft Surface. They have a demo table that they've been showing off, and will be bringing the table to Adobe MAX in Chicago at the end of September. The movie below shows a really cool demo.

There are more videos available on Google video here and here.

The key differences between this and what Microsoft is building are that the AS 3 library will be open source, allowing anyone to incorporate this type of functionality into their own applications. Developers will need a touch screen to handle the user's interactions, but the software will be available as open source. You can get involved and learn more at nuigroup.com.

I can see a big use for this in phones that are running FlashLite on them. Although FlashLite doesn't currently run ActionScript 3 code, hopefully that won't be too far down the road. And if Adobe were to ever get Flash running on a hardware chip, things could get really exciting!

The past few days have seen a flurry of activity in the online mapping world - and Flash technology is at the center of all of it. First, Google added 360 street side views into their online maps, using Flash to display the image. TechCrunch has the story, and Ted Patrick has some more information as well. I love the way that Google is integrating Flash and HTML / Ajax together. This application, along with Google Finance and Google Analytics, are really great examples of how to use Flash in HTML applications.

Then, Mapquest announces that they have support for an ActionScript 3 API for their mapping application. This allows Flex developers to easily build applications that incorporate Mapquest data into their applications, like this golf course finder application. The API itsellf is documented here. This screencast shows the possibilities that come when you can integrate video directly into a mapping application.

Not to be outdone, Zach Graves from Yahoo, created an AS 3 library for Yahoo Maps, and according to Ted Patrick , he completed this in about 24 hours! You can see the result of his work here.

Is online mapping the next area that Flash will take over? Flash currently dominates online video, and is taking over online audio as well. Online mapping is one of the most popular applications on the web, and the possibilities of integrating video and mapping data together is intriguing, as the Mapquest screencast shows. At the very least, Flex developers need to be really happy that they've got an official solution (from Mapquest) to integrate mapping info in their applications, and an unofficial solution (from Yahoo) that's being developed.

The Google Code team has a blog post from your's truly outlining the changes that Adobe made in moving our ActionScript libraries from Adobe Labs to Google Code. If you're looking to build a Flash or Flex application that uses APIs from Flickr, YouTube, Mappr, Odeo, or an application that needs to read in RSS or Atom feeds, then you should look at these open source libraries. The eBay library (which was used as the foundation for the San Dimas eBay Apollo project) is also on the site.

The move enables multiple, public contributors to the projects, so if you're interested in helping out you can now. There are also mailing lists available for all the projects, where you can discuss implementation and problems that you're finding.