Photo Concentration
I really love Adobe Flex. It's a fantastic tool for creating the client side of a cross-platform web-based application. My previous work in Flex had been with Flex 1.5. But recently I decided that I would like to give Flex 2 a try. So I downloaded a 30-day trial of Flex Builder 2 and built a fun little concentration game, using photos from Flickr. There's more ActionScript behind this program than you might think, so I've also provided a link to the source code. Play Photo Concentration     See the source code

Google-Flickr Mashup
I wanted to do a quick little exercise using the Google Maps API and JavaScript. As you check out this rapid prototype, keep in mind that the program, the map, and the photos are coming from 3 different servers. See the mashup The one annoying issue in this prototype is the brief time lag for replacing one photo with the next, during which you can see the previous photo under the wrong name. For me, the interesting question is how such a prototype could be expanded into a full-fledged application. I think it would be great to click on the map of Europe and see a complete slide show of any city. But if the application is going to show, say, 20 photos from each city, then instead of hard-coding the list of photographs, I would want to use the Flickr API or some other system to choose the photos automatically. Now theoretically I could do this using a combination of keywords, geocodes, and Flickr's "interestingness" factor. However, the problem is that many of the photos selected by this method would not be photos about the city -- in other words, not the kinds of photos you would expect to see in a travelogue. So ultimately it might require human intervention -- either someone selecting the photos as I have done in this prototype, or a system that allows users to provide feedback on each photo, ranking the appropriateness of the photo for providing a virtual tour of the city.