Flash, Action Script 3.0 and TOTAL COOLNESS
This is, like, totally cool. I happened to be on Adobe's website and was wondering if they had any blogs I should be looking at. With that in mind, I made my way to their Communities page and, at the top of that page, there was a large button (for lack of a better word), which led me to their Labs site. Here's where I found something really cool.
Adobe Labs have a Showcase Gallery that highlights applications people have created using pre-release versions of Adobe software. The featured application was something called Amaznode. You have to check it out.
Amaznode allows you to conduct a keyword search on Amazon for music, books, software, etc., in one of six countries (US, Japan, France, UK, Germany or Canada). The application crawls the site looking for your keyword and then uses the "Customers who bought this item also bought" data to create interactive webs of related products.
To give it a test drive, I ran a search for "thrash metal" in the "music" section of Amazon in the US. Here's a snippet of the results my search produced:
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I find this way of representing a group of products that have something in common incredibly cool and much easier to use than reading through page after page of lists. It's not just interesting, it's also functional. To add a cd to your shopping cart, or go to its page on Amazon, all you have to do is click on its thumbnail. Also, if your search yields a ton of results, you can drag the various webs around to get a better view (or just see which books or whatever are most densely connected). COOL!
Hats off to the creator of Amaznode, Takayuki Fukatsu, whose website, which contains some surprisingly beautiful animations, can be found here. Fukatsu's use of Flash to create dynamic, visual representations of information reminded me of Yugo Nakamura's work (if you are into Flash and unfamiliar with Nakamura, you've got to check his site out as well). Apparently the connection is more than coincidental. While searching Google for news of Fukatsu, I came across this website he developed for Neovision, a stock photography service that is part of the Amana Group. As it turns out, Nakamura was creative director on that project! Who knew?
