Little Wheel is a wonderfully-illustrated puzzle game starring a robot in a city where the power is out and everything is broken and needs repairing. The levels are cast in shadow against a slick sunset background that suits the game's collection of machines perfectly. Little Wheel is also one of the only flash games I've played with a soundtrack that didn't drive me nuts after 30 seconds. Sure, the fun, jazzy music does get repetitive, but it's good enough to leave on for a little while. The sound effects are great, too.

A little while is probably all you'll need to beat Little Wheel. It's a pretty game, but the puzzles are a little easier than I'd like. Wanton pointing and clicking can get you through some levels, but it's worth playing each level just to see what the machines do. I wish it were longer and more complex, but Little Wheel looks and sounds better than most of the casual puzzle games out there.

I absolutely love the iPhone version of Galcon, and the couple of weeks when I played it obsessively on the subway were worth the cost of the app. The object of the game is to defeat your opponent by sending ships from your planets to enemy planets and overwhelming them with your number, while your opponent tries to do the same to you. Galcon's fast pace and multiplayer mode add to the fun.

Now, in addition to the iPhone and desktop versions, there's a Flash version of Galcon in beta. It's hard to find opponents for multiplayer right now, but it otherwise looks just like the Galcon we know and love. Flash Galcon has a competitor, though, and it's called Nanowar. Nanowar is the same basic game as Galcon, but it only has one mode in single-player, containing 14 preset maps, versus Galcon's infinite randomly-generated boards.

Nanowar has a couple of things going for it, though. First, there's a level editor, which gives you the opportunity to create and save your own boards. Second, the multiplayer games on Nanowar are currently very popular, drawing players from around the world. When they work, that is. Both the level editor and the multiplayer support in Nanowars have been a bit buggy. With Nanowar not yet at 1.0 and Flash Galcon still in beta, it remains to be seen which will attract the larger horde of space-battle-enthused gamers.

Using Psykopaint is as easy as uploading a photo and messing with some of the effects sliders on the side to adjust your brush. Don't worry that there's no way to pick colors, your brush will automatically grab them from your photo. There are sliders for both minimum and maximum, which makes your brush unpredictable and the result more organic. If you set a wide range for brush size, for example, each stroke could end up being a completely different width.

To see what some very serious Psykopainters have come up with, check out the site's gallery. There's some strange, beautiful, and spooky artwork there.

Psykopaint is currently free, but a premium desktop version is in the works.

It's easy to add videos, music and images from around the Internet to your website, but what about games? Heyzap is a way to place any of over 12,000 casual Flash games on your website. It's as simple as copying and pasting a widget code .

Heyzap bills itself as a way to engage with your audience and get them to spend more time on your site. This has an effect on advertising revenue for big players, but I'm not sure it's the most appealing thing about Heyzap when you're just a little guy. I think this could turn into something like the YouTube of games -- instead of sending friends a link to the games you like, just post them right on your blog.

Computer World has published an article asking whether or not Adobe could be gearing up to open-source Flash. That's a question I discussed a while back with Adobe's Dave McAllister, and one that he's continually answered with "the Flash player is as open as I can get it right now."

While most of the inner workings of Flash are already open (The Flex SDK, Blaze DS, and ActionScript virtual machine) there continue to be cries for it to be fully open. Among the stumbling blocks preventing that are the proprietary codecs Adobe licenses (h.264 for video, HE-AAC for audio). "We will continue to open source the technologies that power Flash whenever we have the right to do it," McAllister told me.

Flash is by far the most dominant platform for delivering 80% of all web video and countless browser-based games. Computer World hypothesized that Microsoft's support of the OSS Moonlight project - which has brought Silverlight to Linux - may be putting the heat may be on Adobe to counter quickly.

Adobe sees things differently. Microsoft knows they can't close the gap without help, so getting behind a community effort like Moonlight "Open source can be used as a marketing tool and competitive weapon," McAllister explained. "Silverlight doesn't have the ecosystem that Flash does, so Microsoft is looking at different ways to compete," he continued.

Spewer is a platform game -- think Mario -- with a twist. Instead of playing a super-powered plumber, you're a little pink lab experiment called Spewer, with powers of its own.You can run and jump, like you would expect, but your special power is about as gross as anything Mario ever found in the sewer. That's right: you puke.

In order to pass levels and avoid obstacles, you can use a combination of running, jumping, and filling entire rooms with your own vomit so you can swim to victory. The thing, you have a limited amount of the yucky stuff, and you have to suck it back to get the highest score, and to reuse it at different parts of the harder levels. The concept isn't for the easily-grossed-out, but the game is fun and easy to get the hang of, and Spewer's actually sort of a cute little guy in his own way.

Windosill is a Flash-based puzzle game full of whimsical objects to push, pull, take apart, and otherwise manipulate. Your objective is to maneuver a toy train through rooms full of various toys by playing with the objects you see until you find the block that acts as a key into the next room. Sometimes it's hiding in plain sight, sometimes you have to go through a Mouse-Trap-esque series of moves to discover it.

The art in Windosill is simple and elegant. Half of the fun is in seeing what you can get all the different beautifully-drawn toys to do. Sometimes you'll find the block and not want to move on to the next level because you're trying to see how far you can stretch a spring, or how far you can throw your train. If you get stuck, try dragging things that seem like they should be clicked, clicking things that look like they should be dragged, or repeatedly clicking something that doesn't seem like it does anything at all. Experimentation is key, and that's what makes Windosill fun.

The first five levels of Windosill are available in the free version, but you can get the full game for the very reasonable price of $3.

[via Tiff Chow on Twitter.]

Catalyst is a web-based shooting game with elements of Bejeweled-style color matching. You play a little color-changing ship that destroys molecules of its own color and steals the color of a molecule that doesn't match. As the enemies keep stacking up, you have to change colors rapidly to clear them out.

Although it's a simple premise, Catalyst is a good time waster because it requires quick hands and quick thinking. You get a higher score if you can manage to get a bunch of matching molecules lined up in a row and take them all out at once, but if there's a different one behind them, you'll wind up with its color. Not to mention that there are some wild-card pieces that appear later on in the game that can slow down the flow of enemies, destroy everything behind them, or randomize colors.

At work, I usually either use a drive imaging program to load the operating system and applications onto a machine. If I'm reformatting a customer's machine, I use WPI (Windows Post Installer) to silently install programs. At home, however, I'm a little less cautious when I reformat and often forget to back up my program installers.

That's when something like the Smart Installer Pack might come in handy. It's a pre-packed set of popular applications that you'd likely want to install on your own system (or a friend's) after a fresh format.

It includes a host of apps like Firefox, Chrome, OpenOffice, Winamp, Skype, Daemon Tools, Picasa, Winamp, Thunderbird, Adobe Reader and Flash, WinRar, Rocket Dock, CCleaner, and more. Everything downloads in a single file, so you won't be cluttering up your drive with a bunch of separate installers.

SIP has two drawbacks. First, the installers are interactive, not silent, so you'll have to click through manually. Second, there are a few apps I'd normally install instead - like 7zip and Sumatra PDF. Shortcomings aside, this is still a handy way to get a system up and running quickly with a solid group of commonly-used programs.

Web-based games have come a long way over the years, and Scarygirl is better than most platform adventures you'll find on a console or desktop. Based on comic by Nathan Jurevicius, this game really feels like you're playing inside a comic or a cartoon. The art is phenomenal, the controls are easy to learn, and the level designs are a lot of fun. You play the title character, Scarygirl, as she attempts to locate a man who appears in her mysterious dreams.

You get help and clues from animal characters like Bunniguri and Blister (who is a giant octopus), as you proceed through treehouses, eel-infested water, caves and other fun levels, completing various mini-tasks as you go. Scarygirl is entirely free to play online, and you can register to save your game. You're going to want to do that, because Scarygirl's world is so gorgeous that you won't want to leave. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a bicycle to assemble in level 3.

Adobe Flash is the dominant platform for rich media content on the web. If you've watched an online video, viewed an interactive ad, or played music through a web site in the last few years, you've seen Flash in action. While Microsoft is trying to push Silverlight as an alternative, Flash pretty much owns this space -- on computers.

But HDTV and broadband internet are blurring the lines between web video and television. And Adobe wants to help bring the walls down by pushing Flash for TV and set top boxes including Blu-Ray players and cable boxes. Adobe has already partnered with companies including Intel, Broadcom, Comcast, Netflix, and Disney on the project.

In other words, you can imagine a future where you turn on your TV and in addition to video, on-demand programming, and a program guide, you can pull up weather, news, and other information provided through an internet connection, as well as quick and easy access to web video from any site like ABC.com or Netflix that makes content available for the platform.

Of course, if this all happens, it means you're going to need to get a new TV, set top box, or other hardware in order to enable the new features. Or you can just stick an old computer next to your TV and use Flash the old fashioned way.

[via NewTeeVee]

Do you ever have to design or have input into software user interfaces? If not, you might want to skip this post, but if so, Balsamiq Mockups might be of interest to you. The concept of the program is quite simple: create a bare-bones version of the user interface in question. So bare bones, in fact, that it almost looks like it was sketched.

The hand-drawn style might seem a little funny at first, but it serves a couple of very real purposes. Firstly, it makes it extremely clear that what you create with it is nothing but a mockup; nobody you show it to is actually going to expect that it be able to do anything. Second, it strips away all of the more subjective elements of design like color and shading, so you can focus on the usability of the layout of your user interface.

Balsamiq Mockups is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux, but unfortunately that flexibility comes with a price, in more ways than one. The first price is that it's a Flash application, so to run it on your machine as a desktop app requires Adobe Air. The second price is, well, the price: $79 US to be exact. Well, that's not entirely true. Yes, it is $79US for the full desktop version, but if you're not worried about being able to save your mockups or export them as PNG files, you can install a feature-limited desktop version for free.

[via John Watson]

Crossblocks is a simple puzzle game. How is it played? Would you believe by crossing out groups of blocks to remove them from the play area?

Each level presents a new configuration of blocks that you've got to fully remove, and a specified number that you must remove at once. The first twenty or so levels were fairly easy to zip through, but they give you a good feel for how the game works.

After that, you'll need to be a bit more awake than I was. Your lines don't have to cover full rows - they just need to be long enough to remove the required number of blocks. Many levels have more than one solution that works, which is always welcome in a Flash puzzle game.

Crossblocks is a non-stressful little thinker to help you unwind for a few minutes.