flexpression is here :)

If you have the bandwidth check out this video from channel9 on the new Microsoft product called Expression Interactive Designer. Manuel Clement and the boys worked hard to come up with an innovative new concept that will improve the workflow between the designers and developers. No comment on that part.
The thing that I want to ask from you after you watch the movie is to watch this one. It's Kevin Lynch's Web 2.0 Conference Presentation held back in October last year. Look for the similarities. Or rather try to find the differences. Not saying there aren't any. The Sparkle runtime error is one of them as well :D
But now I want to ask you something. In this era of the new Web 2.0, Google, Flickr, Yahoo and others, now when it becomes more and more obvious that the battle will go the online services way shouldn't it be obvious for everyone what tool to choose?
I mean do you really want to develop Windows only pseudo-online apps and play alone with Vista in Bill's back yard?
Wouldn't you rather play with an Eclipse based Adobe tool that is already proven to deliver consistent online rich user experiences and now promises to do even more?
And that tool to be backed by the Adobe Flash IDE that gets so much love from all of us. And also by the OSFlash crew who will always try to find an easier, more enjoyable and affordable way of doing things.
And all that to run on the Flash Virtual Machine that enables you to deliver truly rich multimedia content to 98% of the web users?
In the end is whether to build a Flickr browser in one hour and run it in your Vista OS vs. building a Flickr browser in 5 minutes for everybody to use in their browser. It's installing a 30 megs framework to run a handful of windows apps vs. installing a 1 mb plugin and enjoying tons of free web content. It's Flash vs. Sprinkles!
I mean come on people, tell a friend!

what is interaction design?

That is a good question.
It's also a good alternative question to my daily "wtf am I doing!?" iterative moment.
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea is based in Milan, Italy and the graduates have generated some very interesting projects on various themes in the field of human-machine interaction. It's also a place I would like to visit some day and maybe stay there and learn something. It's pretty accessible in terms of geo location considering that here in Romania we don't have that many places you can learn interaction design. Actually we have none.
Feel free to prove me wrong if you know better.

happy new flash video year to you all !

Yes, I strongly believe that this will be a second happy year for flash video. Now with Adobe running the show the launch of an even more optimized video authoring/publishing set of tools becomes even more probable. And from the events so far it seems that I'll be up to my neck in flv's. Hopefully the greater majority of those will be that sweet Flash Media Server 2 flavored that are easy to capture and even more easy to playback in your own browser.
I admit that the flavor comes with the not so sweet drawback of using the old Sorenson codec instead of the new on2 one but having automated capture and encoding of the video is so much better. That is if your project can afford it.
On this note I would like to point to one of my recent discoveries on the FMS2 subject. Fabio Sonnati is an italian who I'm guessing has captured so much movie footage from the healthcare industry that he can now perform some bypass procedures all by himself. His blog on the subject of flash video has some excellent points. Check it out if you're interested.

[edit:] the guys at Adobe took only a day to prove me right: Adobe Production Studio