With the power of Flash 8, you can customize the Yahoo! Maps on your site to actually blend with the surrounding design of the site or application. Forget about a rectangular maps and default colors of the map tiles. Use ActionScript, or the IDE to add runtime filters to the map tiles themselves.

The radar “scan” is animated to rotate around, while the pirate map telescope also serves as the zoom level slider.

I’ve seen so many Google Maps applications in the past few months that the sheer novelty and utility value of new ways to access data and maps has started to wear off. These demos made me stop to take a look simply because they look so much better than what we’ve gotten used to lately, and are likely to precipitate a wave of interesting new ideas.

I’m ambivalent about requiring Flash as a client technology. It’s really neat, and is deployed on a lot (but not all) browsers. It’s also somewhat opaque, and chews up a lot of system resources. I can usually tell when I’ve landed on a web page with Flash content somewhere because the fan in my T42 usually starts spinning up after a few seconds instead of running dead silent.

But in the meantime, this made my day.

(via PhotoMatt)