InformIT's Flash Reference Guide host, Matthew David, has produced a 25-page book, named Rich Internet Applications with Flash MX 2004: Under the Hood, and is selling it through CafePress, which means he wrote it, designed it, and prepped it for print all by himself, and will be handling all his own marketing.

Kudos, Matt. I hope it's a CafePress bestseller.

I've been thinking about doing something like this myself, and Matt has inspired me. I guess I should start thinking a little harder.

Another article in my "10 Minutes with Flash" series has just gone live as well. This one is about SWF-to-SWF Communication.

The latest article in my InformIT series, Must-Have Flash Tools, covers things like the the Library Organizer, Document Notes panel, and SEPY, all of which I believe are the most useful Flash tools out there.

If you are looking for the MXI Editor panel mentioned in the article, you can find it here.

Accoona, the new search site backed by former President Clinton that claims to use artifical intelligence to make its search results more relevant, is making a case for and against Google at the same time.

As I mentioned in my Most Usable Site Ever post, Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button confuses people, and therefore, Google cannot quite sell me on being the most usable site ever. Accoona, however stands a solid chance - if you don't consider the search results.

Accoona's site is very Google-esque, with nothing but a white screen and search box with which to begin your Accoona experience, and the search results page contains no ads, textual or otherwise. This earns Accoona big points in the usability department. One point for Accoona.

But with the good comes the bad. Accoona promises more relevant search results, but I'm not impressed so far. First, I did a search against my own book title, Flash Out of the Box (with and without quotes), and the first five results were "sponsored results", which, while not necessarily a bad thing, tripped me up at first. I didn't see the seperation in the page between the sponsored results and Accoona results. This may be great for the company, but skewing results for dollars does not a good user-experience make. The first three non-sponsored results, once I found them, included WidgetMaker.net (this site), one page where you could learn more about the book, and a third for a company called "Out of the Box Publishing", which has absolutely nothing to do with Flash. In fact, a page through which you can buy the book did not appear in the search results at all unless the search was done with book title in quotes. (Google's first result for the same search is a link to the book's product page on Amazon.) Sorry Acoona. One point for Google.

At first I assumed/hoped/guessed that Accoona parses the content that surrounds the keywords you search for and then digs up related results based on the surrounding content. But it doesn't seem to happen this way, and I haven't yet cracked the code of the Accoona search logic.

I can tell you this: Google is still the clear winner of the search war. But Accoona's making a case for Most Usable Site Ever. It's not a winner yet, but I'm keeping my eye on it.

Apparently, Colin Moock recommends my book.

I'm just as surprised as you are. It's sort of a surreal moment when a guy you learn from recommends your book. I'm suddenly feeling very humble.

Someone I work with suggested yesterday that Google has the most usable web site ever. Coincidentally, my wife, who teaches computer classes at her library, was just telling me the day before that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button confuses people.

I often include Google in conversations about usability, comparing Google to Yahoo in what has now become a classic argument for me. But the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which is a permanent part of web folklore at this point, does confuse people. It confused me the first time I used it. The Google homepage, which has a total of 13 entry points at the moment, has only one banana: the Search box. And that's good design. But the disorienting "I'm Feeling Lucky" button still makes it more complicated than it needs to be, and therefore, new users are still thrown by it. As a result, I'm betting there is a site somewhere on the web that is, in fact, more usable than the Google homepage.

So if the search giant, masked only by a plain white screen and a Search box, can't win me over for Most Usable Site Ever, who can?

Well, I don't have an answer to that right now, but my new mission is to find it.

In the meantime, tell me what you think. What would you point to as the most usable site ever?

The Macromedia KnowledgeBase went live today. It's essentially a centralized place to find information on any Macromedia related topic you could possibly want to research, and it should prove very handy.

I took it on a little test drive earlier and came up with some solid search results (powered by Google). The KnowledgeBase also features a nice, clean UI, which makes it easy to access and use the advanced search features.

O'Reilly Network is now featuring an excerpt from my new book, Flash Out of the Box. The excerpt is Appendix A, which is about workflow and workspace tips.