I was just chatting with Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path and Measure Map fame. He pointed out that the measure mappers have quietly left a wee New Year’s gift for those who want to slide more easily into 2006.
The Measure Map Date Slider is a nifty flash component for meandering time. And they’ve made a version of this available for public consumption under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can grab the Flash ready-to-run SWF or developer’s FLA bundle from the Measure Map site.
This is just the sort of componentized innovation I wrote about in my post on sliders being the new drop-downs. Ajax–while the technologies underlying have existed for some time now–has done wonders for pragmatic interface design. And rather than the initial Ajax vs. Flash debates, there’s been a re-perception of Flash as rich componenture rather than Java applet replacement and of course you see quite a bit in Ajax implementations that draw heavily from Flash.
P.s. Now if only they would take my feedback about allowing you to drag-and-adjust the points on my visitors graph–if not to simply increase the number of visitors, but space them out a little more evenly ;-).