Aaron’s daughter learns about project scope

And a little Flash to boot 🙂

Flash sounds like a perfect tool to teach programming. Others I’ve been reading about:

Alice

Scratch (scratch is built on Squeak Smalltalk – there are other educational environments/tools built with it as well)

Snake Wrangling for Kids

Pygame

My roots: LOGO and Commodore BASIC.

Interesting related article at O’Reilly: Why Johnny Can’t Program.

Flash, UI, and football fans check out “Inside the Playbook” at NYTimes

The NYTimes uses Flash to produce analysis of each match-up in the NFL playoffs and a fun game to predict winners.

Here is one example of upcoming game analysis: Inside the Playbook: Philadelphia at Minnesota

Here is the predict the winner game: Inside the Playbook Challenge

And go Eagles!

CNN gets rid of the crawl

I expected this to be bigger news in my circles, but it hasn’t registered. CNN has rejected the news crawl for a far less busy headline flip in its news broadcasts. The new UI makes it far easier to absorb the news broadcast without constant distraction and sometimes even helps to clarify whatever it is that is being reported. Great job CNN.

NYTimes: The Flipper Challenges the Crawl

Open Source Rich Internet Application Framework at CIM: OpenPyro

Check it out: OpenPyro: OpenPyro is a pure AS3 framework for creating RIA’s. Open Pyro draws a lot of inspiration from Flex but aims to be more expressive as well as have a smaller filesize and memory footprint.

Arpit Mathur, one of the most brilliant developers I know and a straight up Flash guru is leading the Open Pyro project. He recently posted about OpenPyro on his personal blog and includes a screencast of him using the framework to develop an app.

Kevin Fitzpatrick another CIM Flash master, and lead developer of another open source project at CIM, LogBook, comments about OpenPyro.

An Ajax RSS Reader

William Lazar cooked up a sweet RSS reader you can read about on his blog using Google’s Ajax Feed API and MooTools.

Part of me wants to whip up a Popurls page using this, that stores what feeds you want to see in a cookie. Something like that could take only a few hours, with minimum feed tech knowledge.