“For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia,” says the protest message on the Wikipedia site.

Wikipedia, along with Reddit, WordPress and a lot more popular websites have gone black in protest of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). Here’s how 10 of the most popular websites looked like today:

1. Wikipedia

2. Reddit

3. WordPress

4. Mozilla

5. Wired

6. O’Reilly

7. Explosm

8. Digital Public Library of America

9. Digifreak

10. Twitpic

Have you joined the strike or protested in some way?

What would a day without Facebook be like? What are the craziest Black Friday states? What social networks do small businesses use, or do they use them at all? How profitable is mobile marketing? Or what does it annoy people about the emails they get? These are just a few of the questions answered below in a couple of infographics that went viral this year.

So, go ahead and check out the top 10 infographics of 2011 that people shared on the web.

Top 10 Infographics of 2011

A World Without Facebook 

Many people check their Facebook accounts the minute they wake up. Can we imagine a life without Facebook? If not, then check out this infographic.

Source: singlegrain.com

An Average Day on Facebook 

Curious to see what your friends do on Facebook on a regular day? Find out from the infographic below.

Source: jess3.com

Facebook vs. Google 

We all know about the launch of Google Plus and the rumors that went around claiming it would take Facebook down. But was there really a battle between the two? The answers in the infographic below.

Source: singlegrain.com

“Craziest” Black Friday States 

Who went crazy on Black Friday this year? And what did people buy last year? See in the infographic below.

Source: blackfriday2011.com

The Anatomy of a Fan 

Every brand out there wants more fans. But do they know their fans or have any idea on how they behave online? This infographic might give you some ideas.

Source: moontoast.com

Mobile Marketing 

How big is the mobile market? Is it really growing that fast? How can you use that to grow you business? Check some facts in the infographic below and see how you can benefit from it.

Source: marketingpilgrim.com

Social Media Marketing By The Numbers 

How much money do advertisers spend on social media marketing? Is it worth advertising on Facebook or is it just a huge waste of money? Find out more from this infographic.

Source: hubspot.com

Social Media: Bridging The Gap  

Do businesses know how to use social media to interact or get more clients? Check out this infographic to find out.

Source: exploringsocialmedia.com

Email Irritations: What Annoys People About Emails? 

Why are we so annoyed about the emails we get?Is it because we’re receiving too much or is it because most of it we find to be useless? Or is it both? See the infographic to find out for yourself.

Source: ccloop.com

Where’s Google Making Its Money? 

With so many free tools and application, how in the world is Google making so much money? Curious? It’s all in the infographic below.

Source: kaiserthesage.com

Now tell us – which one of these graphics you found to be the most useful?

AIR 2.0 comes with great updates and new features that will enable developers to create cross-platform applications faster and more secure. Working with AIR 2.0 will turn out to be an exceptional application experience. Here is the list provided by Adobe Labs with the improved features:

• Open documents with default application
• Mass storage volume detection
• Native process API
• Microphone data access
• Multi-touch and gesture events
• Global error handling
• Improved IPv6 support
• Server sockets sup
• Database transaction savepoints
• Screen reader support (Windows only)
• File promises (Windows/Mac only)
• IME API and IME text input enhancement
• Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support
• Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards

As for the prerelease of FP 10.1 we must know that this “is the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices”. Flash Player is a cross-platform runtime across desktop and mobile devices, therefore having support on a wide range of devices from smartphones to netbooks or smartbooks.

Note

A thing we should consider is that both versions are either beta or prerelease which means they will probably have some bugs, but the full half of the glass is that we can explore these new features and test them on our new projects. As Adobe developers is our job to provide a feedback in order to improve the future alpha releases.

For further information about these products and were you can download them access the Adobe Labs page.

So I asked myself where to begin with this post, about what should I write that will be worthy to read. The answer: everything! I should write about every thing that is influenced by climate change, because this world that we live in is like a food-chain, everything relates and is interdependent. I often considered that we humans have a symbiosis with things that surround us. But, like I said there is so much to cover that I’ll have to stick to one subject in particular: Technology.

As we know the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the result of various activities of the mass population. This includes the economics, politics, agriculture, events, business, industry, technology and much more. GHG emissions can be reduced by a decreasing activity from each of the above mentioned areas. When talking about economics and politics you encounter a block of bricks regarding ecological views. But technology on the other hand is a sure thing. In the past years much attention has been directed toward the role of technological improvement has on reducing carbon emissions and its imprint on economic market.

Countries around the world have adopted different policies regarding taxes for residential and commercial purchasers of new energy-efficient homes, energy efficient equipment such as electric and natural gas heat pumps, natural gas water heaters, advanced central air conditioners, fuel cells and many other technological aspects.

Various fields from technological industry have made serious development toward a green and safer world. The automobile industry for example: hybrid cars (Toyota Prius), computers: LCD and Plasma screen, refrigerators, wash-machines and so on. This steps that were made in order to reduce the CO2 emissions will influence other factors especially in the longer term, we just have to imagine the whole picture at this moment. As I sad, our world is interdependent and everything we do reverberates in other ares.

I am glad that bloggers around the world gather and use their online power to make a statement that will matter, that will be heard. The world faces a climate and environment change and now is the time that we make a change to avoid these things to evolve.

5 Eco Tips

To finish this post properly I wrote 5 tips for computer users to maintain a low use of energy during the day.

1. If you take a 10-30 min break turn off the monitor, and if you know you will be gone a while switch off the computer
2. Reduce the paper using by: reading online news, magazine and resort to online payment bills
3. If you upgraded to LCD or Plasma which are more economical by the way than CRT, don’t forget to recycle your old computer components
4. Purchase online products from e-commerce site. This will not only save you a lot of time but will also save gas and lower the carbon emissions that you usually produce when driving to the market
5. During day work use the natural light, first you’ll make an economical energy act and second it’s healthy for your eyes, very healthy!

For more information about the action visit http://www.blogactionday.org

The upgraded version of Adobe Flash will allow you to build stand-alone applications for iPhone and iPod using AS3. Through these new features you can use in your development every AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 APIs available at the moment. Flash Player 10.1 will be available on almost every mobile platform (such as Android,Blackberry etc, not to mention the desktop OS), but I’m guessing that is a matter of time until it will be on iPhones as well, especially with the beta release of CS5 by the end of the year.

There are 7 examples of Flash application and games for iPhone that were developed using a prerelease version and they can be purchased from the App Store. You can see the list here.

A thing you should consider is that the standalone applications build will be native iPhone apps, not the usual swf that we run in the browser. That’s because the final result, the swf file, is compiled using the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM). This compiler has flexibility and applicability to iPhone development. Thus the result is a native iPhone application.

The developer’s community has been waiting this for a while, and like any other exhilarating news about Adobe products the FAQ list is long and increasing. You can find out more information about this on the Adobe Labs page on the FAQ section. And if you want you can signup to be notified when the beta CS5 is released.

But despite the fact that Adobe TV offers a large variety of videos about almost every product from Adobe, there were several complaints about the user experience, the loading time and the mess caused by the uploading of videos in a hurry, without categorizing them.

There for Bob Donlon, along with the team behind Adobe TV re-built the site’s architecture from scratch and used a new search engine. Launched at the end of August, the site has great new features that will surely stand up to Adobe standards:

• Loading speed is really quick
• Easier to search content and find the videos you want to see
• User customizable Home page
• You can have the shows that you like, to appear on Adobe TV homepage every time you come and visit the site
• Save the favorite videos to a “My Library”
• Share any video to your Facebook wall, Digg or other social networks directly from the site
• Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite sh
• Pop-out video player to view videos at any size
• Commenting, Rating and Taging

Another important mention is that the site is now completely built in HTML, CSS and Javascript and for the video content, no need to say. The videos are being classified by Products such as Ps, Fl, Fx etc and by Channels like Design, How to, Developers and different other. On the home page they are even sorted by Highest Rated (since we can now rate a clip), Most Viewed. You got the main idea.

This new interface gave me a boost to create an account and play a little with these improved features. They are really great, like a virtual agenda with only the important stuff highlighted. But it’s up to you if you want to give it a shot. You can find out more on the Adobe TV site and convince yourself.

What is Mate?

Mate is a light, powerful MXML-based Flex framework with an MVC architectural pattern that eases the developers work by giving them maximum flexibility. The framework is entirely tag-based and its focus is on event handling, data binding and asynchronous processing.

This Flex framework has a built-in event-driven (based on the idea of a Map Event) thus allowing you to define who is handling those events, whether data needs to be retrieved from the server, or other events need to be triggered. This feature makes it very unobtrusive and easy to learn.

Mate allows you to keep using Flex event model, it does not invent its own like most other frameworks. You can dispatch an event from anywhere in the view hierarchy and have it bubble up to the framework automatically. Other powerful feature is that it implements a form of Dependency Injection which allows you to connect your models to your views without either one knowing about the other one. That makes it easy and fast to create, maintain, and debug applications. “An Injector will insert the appropriate property into all instances of a particular component, without having to pass it through the component’s parental hierarchy.”

The specific code can be encapsulated in a handful of objects. Also the application code has no dependencies on the framework, it is highly decoupled, reusable and testable. When using this framework we won’t work with Singleton pattern anymore because it has a caching solution that detects which objects have been instantiated and handles the flow of data between them.

Mate read as “Mah-teh” was created by Nahuel Foronda and Laura Arguello from AsFusion. Mate had 17 new releases in the last year and hundreds of commits to its repository. I would say that this framework is gaining some quality reputation among Flex developers.

Endline

Since its release there were many tingles about the pros and cons about Mate and it is often compared with other Flex frameworks such as Cairngorm or PureMVC. From what I’ve heard there are some feasible advantages when using Mate in your development. The important novelty that this project brings unlike the others is that it has The Event Map (gives a clear vision about the control flow through the application) and the Class Caching(no more use of the Singleton pattern). You can use this framework both in small or large projects and you can relax because it will give all the flexibility you need and won’t restrain your imagination when creating a project.

But for further examples of projects developed with Mate visit the site at mate.asfusion.com. I forgot to mention that this framework has a well written documentation, tutorials and an active community on the forum. Even so you are used with other frameworks I’ll simply say it’s worth giving a shot. You may found out it is more suitable to your tasks.

Take your time and dive into the list bellow. These agency websites, not only they have a sparkling design but also they hold an interesting portfolio. I trust that you will find them useful for your own development.

You can also check a previous post that we have published 20 awesome agency websites.

1. Screenagers

2. The Egg Republic

3. Jam3Media

4. Socio Design

5. Hello Design

6. Buzz Image

7. Le Site

8. Un.Titled

9. Trix

10. Aaltra

11. Pixeling Life

12. Tangram

13. Duke Interactive

14. F&B Forsman Bodenfors

15. Checkland Kindleysides

16. Neostream

17. Cartelle

18. Also Online

19. Razorfish

20. D10Studio

21. Danka Studio

22. Hatica

23. Brand Studio

24. Zign

25. Caime & Friends

26. Nuova Design Lab

27. Underdog

28. Multiadaptor

29. Waypoint Design

30. Fiero Animals

31. Flash Zone

32. Dead Line

33. Cubic

Pixel Bender technology is embedded in a toolkit that includes the Pixel Bender kernel language and graph language, the Pixel Bender Toolkit IDE, sample filters, and documentation. The Pixel Bender run-time engine is integrated into a number of Adobe applications, allowing you to add your Pixel Bender filters and effects to those already offered in those applications.

The Pixel Bender kernel language is a high-performance graphics programming language intended for image processing algorithms. This language provides several built-in functions that can be used for calculations of many specific cases: Mathematical, Geometric, Region, Sampling, Intrinsics.

The Pixel Bender graph language is an XML-based language that describes the structure of a graph used for combining individual pixel-processing operations (kernels) into more complex filters. It allows you to create more sophisticated image processing effects by connecting multiple Pixel Bender kernels into a processing graph that can be treated as a single filter.

The Pixel Bender Toolkit IDE is an interactive development environment in which you can create, compile and preview Pixel Bender kernels. The IDE allows you to edit and execute programs that use the Pixel Bender image-processing engine.

One important note is that the basic unit of image processing in Pixel Bender is the kernel. The job of a kernel is to produce a single output pixel. In addition to the samples and documentation, there is a command-line utility for converting a kernel file into a byte-code file that can be used in Flash Player 10. Pixel Bender defines three file formats: PBK, PBJ, and PBG.

The technology development offers many advantages such as:

• Low learning curve — Pixel Bender offers a small number of tools that are sufficient to write complex image-processing algorithms. Learning Pixel Bender is easier than learning C/C++ and each application’s plug-in SDK. You do not need to know any graphics shading language or multi-threading APIs.
• Parallel processing — Pixel Bender allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems. It delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products.
• Supports all bit-depths — The same kernel runs in 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit within the application.
• Support by multiple Adobe applications — Pixel Bender is integrated with multiple Adobe applications. It allows you to develop filters that are portable among various Adobe products.

You can use Pixel Bender in you graphic development like: filters, fills, blend modes, calculations (the built-in functions from the kernel language).

If you decide to dive into this Adobe technology you can read more in the Pixel Bender Developer’s Guide and download the Toolkit from Adobe Labs page.

So, let’s go through some of the information I gathered reading about this event to have an in depth view of what’s going to happen there, who are the speakers, price tickets and so on.

Introduction

This conference is brought by On the Fridge, LLC. Last year the event was Pittsburgh’s first major Flash-centric conference. And because of the overwhelming response from the community the organizers decided to officially make it an annual event. This year is going to take place at Sheraton Hotel Station Square.

Flashpitt 2009 is a two-day conference for interactive designers, developers and artists. It’s a chance to take a break from the daily grind to recharge, learn and be inspired. The novelty that Flashpitt brings this year is the addition of a workshops day.

On the first day there are going to be four half-day workshops with topics about ActionScript 3.0(beginning and intermediate), Flash Video and Flash Media Server, iPhone Development. The workshops will highlight the important information and give you an insight note and training from the well known industry’s experts.

The second day is scheduled with full lecture-style sessions in two tracks. The organizers are also excited about the speaker list for this year: Jer Thorp, Seb Lee-Delisle, Odopod, Dan Mall, Stacey Mulcahy, Scott Janousek, Phillip Kerman, Ian Coyle.

Like any other event there are tickets at early bird price, regular and of course for students. At the time I’m writing this post there are only 5 days left to get Early Bird Flashpitt Conference tickets. But for more details about the price and how to acquire them visit the registration page.

The event is assisted by sponsors like O’Reilly, FITC, Peachpit, Influxis, RefreshPittsburgh etc.

Closure

“All without venturing too far from home.” That’s what the organizers say…so I guess if you are from around that place this conference should be a must go. Because like any event of this kind, the conference could provide you extra information and tips about areas in which you are interested, you get to know people like minded and it’s a useful experience for your development. Unfortunately for me it’s too far from where I live, but I’ll keep an eye on the afterwards info.

To find out more about the sessions, speakers or anything about the event visit Flashpitt.com