Linked listbox component: Raymond Camden describes a Flash component controlled by ColdFusion... see demo to get an idea of how useful this can be... download and code quick view available. Looks good.

FlashCom tutorial recommendation: Sam Wan recommends Giacomo Guilizzoni's new instant poll tutorial, and states he'll be emphasizing development of such components in his own work. (More in Sam's blog.)

MatchNet & FlashCom: "MatchNet, the five-year-old site which began as a place for Jewish singles, plans to include Flash animation technology in the next version of its instant message service so people can see each other through a Webcam, said chief technology officer Peter Voutov."

Nobody knows you're a dog: This is a short review of The Dog Listener by Jan Fennell. I haven't read it, or tested it, on either dogs or humans, but it's rather startling. Pull quote: "There is every chance that your dog thinks that it is the leader of your pack, and that you are its subordinate... when an "owner" abandons a dog, for example by leaving the dog at home, and the dog gets into a frazzle and bites the furniture and messes up the carpets, the dog isn't reacting like an abandoned child. The dog is reacting like a distracted parent who has lost its child."

Diane Warren on music piracy: This op/ed was linked from WIRED. Diane has apparently written some songs which someone sang and made a lot of money from. She's lucky. 75-100 years ago many more people wrote songs, and the money was in the sale of sheet music. Since recordings (and radio!) became popular sales of sheet music have plummetted. "A lot of great songwriters (and bands) get only one commercial hit in their career." So?

(We're all trying to figure out how to distribute and profit from digital creation now. I suspect that most of the problems with the music industry come from its growth into an unsustainable cartel, and the digital questions are just a triggering mechanism.)

$299 PocketPC: New crop is starting to hit. This ViewSonic unit is the first PocketPC under $300, and weighs less than five ounces.(More coverage at ComputerWorld, CNET.)

SeedWiki: I'm not sure why this wasn't on my radar before... believe I heard about it before sabbatical but never checked it...? Anyway, it's a set of Wikis (a "wiki farm") implemented in ColdFusion. It's easy to start your own wiki hosted there, or to use the source code yourself. They host many wikis, organized by topic, in many languages.

(What's "wiki"? It's a fast method for collaborative writing... any reader can edit any page at any time. I think it's particularly good for knowledge areas where people are discovering what actually needs to be written about, or where there's an emphasis on getting the simplest yet most comprehensive documentation of the issue. Meatball Wiki is a good place to start for deeper study.)

PDF to SWF: I was excited by the conversation last week about this work, but I haven't evaluated the implementation personally and so hesitated to blog it. Jeremy does lay out the case why this could be a significant advantage to developers, though: current viewership; use as web service; configurable UI; integration with non-text Flash features; ease of upgrades; portability. (So far the biggest complaint I've seen is that printing of multi-page documents is difficult in this dynamically-created SWF... this was an issue for one person, and may not be intractable.)

CF-Talk on Flash apps: Lengthy discussion on current use of Flash in web apps among subscribers. There's not a single takeaway I walk away with, but the thread gives a good idea about the current practices of various individuals. (Jump up a level to see spinoff threads.)