USA Today has a cool RIA built with Flash that follows the polls in the US presidential race, state by state and for the entire country. The application provides historical results for each poll, and also graphs them over time to see how the race is changing.

This is a nice, simple application that displays a lot of information in a format that is meaningful and intuitive. Not an easy thing to do.

Today Adobe announced that they've made a special version of the Flash Player available to Google and Yahoo that allows them to fully index rich Internet applications and other SWF content. The content in rich Internet applications is now available to Google, and that means that RIAs should be easier to find in Google. This is one of the main issues that people ask about when talking about rich Internet applications, so its great to see Google, Yahoo and Adobe working together to solve this problem.

More at the official Google blog and on TechCrunch.

Flex is being used to build a lot of highly useful, enterprise class applications these days that really help businesses - this isn't one of them. Strip Poker men's club has built an online version of strip poker (note: some of the content on the site is NSFW) with Flex and Flash. According to the description, the application allows you to chat with other people in the lobby, and then enter a "private" room where you can play strip poker. Of course, with the ability of the Flash Player to access the user's webcam, this is true "strip poker".

Via Digg.

EarthBrowser is a super cool Adobe AIR application that allows users to see all sorts of data on top of a 3D representation of earth. Data such as earthquakes, weather, clouds, tropical storms, tectonic plates and more can all be enabled or disabled over top of a 3D Earth, with some data displayed using a time animation. Its a bit like Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth, but done in Flash and AIR by one guy.

You can spin the globe and browse events by spinning the globe and then clicking on the data points - you can even go back in time, and change the data in view by moving a slide back - data from up to 6 hours earlier is available.

The use of AIR is well done, as it allows you to drag and drop KML files from the browser or desktop into the application - an easy way to add data to the application.

The application is written by Matt Giger. You can follow Matt's progress on his blog. Word is that he'll be at Google next month talking about EarthBrowser - more details should be available on his blog>.

Matt is selling the application for $29.95 (finally an application that isn't supported with advertising!) Steve Wozniak was apparently the 11th person to purchase a copy, which is pretty cool.

Wix is an online Flex based application that allows you to easily create Flash content, without having to use Adobe's Flash tool. Your content created in Wix can be shared online in your Facebook page, website, blog etc... The site was recently featured on TechCrunch, and is similar to Sprout.

Wix has created a number of pre-built widgets for regular people, without Flash skills (like me!), to use. You can easily integrate photos from Flickr, and video from YouTube, or create entire Flash based websites using templates that they've created.

They've given RIAPedia readers 300 accounts into their closed beta. Register today using this URL if you'd like to check it out.

Adobe and a number of industry leaders have announced a new initiative called the "Open Screen Project" that completely changes the game for RIA developers, and sets the stage for RIAs on mobile devices. The Open Screen Project removes restrictions on the SWF and FLV specifications - now anyone can create their own player or tools to create SWF content, similar to how PDF is. Adobe is also publishing the device porting layer APIs for Flash Player, so that anyone can create their own Flash Player for platforms that aren't currently supported, especially useful for mobile devices.

Mobile development will also get a boost by the removal of license fees for distributing the Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices. Handset manufacturers will not need to pay Adobe to install the Flash Player on their devices. Adobe hopes that this will result in 1 billion phones having the mobile version of Flash (currently FlashLite) installed on them.

There's a lot of coverage of this online this morning. Slashdot has the story, which always has interesting views from the open source community. CNET, Ryan Stewart and the Washington Post have it from a news angle. TechCrunch has the story as well, with some very supportive comments from readers.

Dilbert has gone all Web 2.0. Dilbert.com has relaunched with a new interface, and new features. Dilbert.com now allows users to rate, share, embed Dilbert into their own sites and blogs, has an RSS feed that allows you to read the latest Dilbert from your favourite RSS reader.

The site also includes a new Flash application that allows users to add their own endings to Dilbert strips, in a feature they're calling Mashups. Eventually users will be able to add their own text to the entire Dilbert strip, though for now its limited to just the final frame of the comic.

Animated Dilbert comic strips are also available.

Via News.com.

FITC is set for April 19th to the 22nd in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you're a Flash or Flex developer you'll want to attend this conference, as there are a number of great presentations for RIA developers. and as a RIApedia reader you can save 10% off a regular conference pass. Just enter the code "RIA0312" when you register for the conference.

According to this blog post, Flash support is coming soon on the iPhone. It remains to be seen which version of Flash will be supported on the phone (FlashLite or the full Flash Player), but keep in mind that the iPhone uses a stripped down version of OS X. To me that would imply that the player will be Flash Player 9, which would include support for Flex applications.

Yahoo has released a set of Flash and Flex components for rich Internet applications. "ASTRA, the ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications, is a collection of Flash and Flex components, code libraries, toolkits and utilties developed by Yahoo! for ActionScript developers." The Flash components include an alert manager, audio playback and a menu bar. The Flex components include colour pickers, an autocomplete manager, time input and more.

Via Ryan Stewart. More details at the Y! Flash blog.