UI

The new baby name visualization tool from Baby Name Brainstorm has been making the rounds in all the visualization blogs. It's a great platform for exploring a huge data set of first names. It's aesthetically pleasing, very responsive, and a pleasure to use.

That said, I noticed a couple things that could be improved.

This article goes over the basics of implementing custom mouse cursors in ActionScript 3.0 and offers some tips for making it behave in a more professional way.

Custom mouse pointers are pretty easy to implement in ActionScript 3.0 Flash movies. I'll go over the basics first, but if you want to skip to the bits about making it look more professional, be my guest.