ScaleNine offers a list of 10 Ways to Skin a Flex App. There are lots of great links to resources for skinning your app from CSS to programmatic skinning to 9-slice.

The ever cleaver Gina Trapani from Lifehacker documents how to Create your master feed with Yahoo! Pipes. What is your master feed? Well is is an aggregation of your feeds from all your social networking sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, or any other site that provides you with an RSS feed of your activities.

Frantic Industries presents 5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes. Some great ideas are in this list that may open you eyes to the power and possibilities of this new service from Yahoo!

Chris Brichford, an engineer on Adobe Apollo team, talks about Leveraging HTML and JavaScript in Apollo Applications in a video from this year’s MAX in Las Vegas. There are some nice examples of how to manipulate the HTMLControl (an embedded web browser) by applying blurs and rotations, and how to mashup content from websites like Google Maps with a Flex UI wrapper.

One of the small gems in this presentation is when Chris talks about the selection of WebCore and JavascriptCore as the HTML rendering engine for Apollo. WebKit is open-source, has a small footprint, is mobile friendly and Apollo will be kept in sync with Apple’s Safari web browser. In the true spirit of open-source, Adobe is sharing a significant amount of code with Apple.

I’m sure it won’t be too long before somebody creates a very simple Apollo Web Browser that can be used by Windows and Linux users for testing web site compatibility with the popular Safari browser.

[Video link via Peter Elst]

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection is starting to gather a great collection of tutorials for using their amazing web services. Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3 is one that caught my eye. It is full of short examples that shows virtually every part of the S3 service and how to access it using Rails.

Mac’s have some of the simplest and most effective software applications available for any platform. Case in point is a free application by Freeverse called Think. It task is simple, hide all of the OS and any open application except for one. The app you choose to focus on is presented on top of a black background and all other open apps are hidden behind the black background. This hides all the distractions of web browsers, IM and email clients, etc. Think makes it easy to switch between active applications and even to temporarily peek into another open app. And the UI is terribly simple! Check it out!

Ah - this is just too funny not to post! A great and very creative photo! The look on this guy’s finger is just crazy!

Fingerman vs water

Yahoo! Pipes looks like a product that could change the way web designers and developers consume and user RSS. Pipes are a familiar terminology if you have ever done any Unix command line work. Pipes in Unix-land allow you to route the output of one tool into the input of another tool. The pipe character | is used as a separator between each command. So what makes Yahoo Pipes revolutionary? Well to start it provides a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to connect RSS feeds from multiple sources and perform operations like sorting, counting, and grouping. And it does this without requiring the developer or designer to write a single line of code.

There is some really good discussion and analysis of this new service from the likes of Tim O’Reilly, Jeremy Zawodny, Niall Kennedy, Richard MacManus, and even Google’s Matt Cutts.

Here is a quick guide to connecting ColdFusion to a local instance of SQL Server 2005 Express.

My first attempt to do this seemingly simple task resulted in an “Error establishing socket. Connection refused: connect” error when trying to create a new data source. The cause of this error is that by default, SQL Server Express does not allow for connections over TCP/IP ports. To create the data source, we first need to configure SQL Server and enable connections over TPC/IP. The process is pretty easy, so lets get started!

First, you want to open the SQL Server Configuration Manger by choosing Start » All Programs » Microsoft SQL Server 2005 » Configuration Tools » SQL Server Configuration Manger. Next, in the left sidebar of the Configuration Manager, expand the SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration node. Now click on the Protocols for SQLEXPRESS node. Now in the right hand pane, double-click on the TCP/IP item. This will open the TCP/IP Properties window.

In the TCP/IP Properties window, choose Yes from the dropdown list in the Enabled row. Next we need to configure the IP addresses that are to receive connections on, so click on the IP Address tab. Look for the section named IPAll and enter in the port that SQL Server will listen for connections on. In the TCP Port row, type in 1433 (or any other port number you wish to use). Now click the OK button. You will be prompted to Restart the SQL Server (do this using either the Services control panel applet or by using SLQ Server Management Studio Express).

Now you should be able to connect your ColdFusion to SQL Server 2005 Express!

Rogie King show us his CSS skills with his awesome CSS Star Rating System. The implementation is extremely simple and uses nothing but a couple of images and some CSS selectors!