FlashObject is  a Javascript Flash detection and embedding script that is small and feature rich.  It makes adding Flash to your sites easy and foolproof - unless your end user has JavaScript disabled (in which case they probably don’t use Flash either)!

If you’re looking to build RIA’s using Ruby on Rails you should check out the OpenLaszlo gem that provides Rich Flash output for your Rails views. There is also a Rails plugin to hook it all up for easy generation of OpenLaszlo applets.

AMFPHP project reached the version 1.0 milestone last week. I’ve been following this project for over 2 years and it’s great to see it finally reaching full production status. AMFPHP is an open-source Flash Remoting gateway that is fast, reliable, 100% free and open-source.

SwarmSketch is the brainchild of Peter Edmunds, a 22-year-old communications student at the University of Canberra, in Australia. Each week he grabs the top search term from the major search engines and invites people to contribute a line to a collaboratively drawn sketch. You can contribute one line of limited length then you can vote on lines submitted by other users by changing the opacity of their line.

del.icio.us has a very cool new feature that turns any link to an MP3 file within a webpage into an interactive and embedded media player. playtagger gets used by including a simple <script> element onto your webpage, which in turn replaces all anchor elements that point to an MP3 file into a small Flash-based media player.

Pandora is a web-based service that helps you discover new music. The web app is a Flash RIA that asks you to type in an artist whose music you like, then based on an alogrithm created by the Music Genome Project it chooses artists whose style is close to that of the one you entered. It’s really quite remarkable and worth checking out.

The service is available by subscription (only $36 per year) or alternately by a free, ad supported player.

Airtight Interactive’s Felix Turner has developed an excellent free Flash-based slideshow tool. SimpleViewer Download is easy to use and loads images that are specified in a simple XML file. Images are preloaded as the user views other images in the slideshow making this slideshow tool perform very nicely.

vox delicii is a very cool Flash application to help you visualize the most popular sites being added to the del.icio.us public bookmarking system.

Now that we are in the grips of a warm summer, I thought that I would show off a piece of work we finished here a few months ago. The British Columbia Irrigation Scheduling Calculator is a Flash application that helps home owners schedule their landscaping irrigation systems so that plants and grass get the water they require while at the same time, not wasting any precious water.

The calculator has specific data for British Columbia, but you can manually enter in your own Evaportranspiration (ETo) rates that are specific to your area. To find your ETo rates do a Google search for Reference Evapotranspiration for your State or Province.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has some tips for implementing Scrolling and Scrollbars. He specifically looks at custom scrollbars created in Flash and show examples of those that fail and succeed.