Pimp out your ride, without having a knock on the door from X to the Z (Xzibit). If you aren't familiar with MTV's Pimp my Ride series, it features rap superstar Xzibit surprising viewers owning junky cars with a fresh custom ride from customization specialists GAS.

This little flash eCard builder plays off the Pimp my Ride series. Choose your ride, Ol'Skool, Coupe or SUV. Slap on paint, wheels, chrome, parts and finish it off with a unique scene. Save it out and send it to a friend and maybe start a battle of custom work.

UPDATE: MTV has just informed us that a new wilder Virtual Pimp My Ride is launching tonight at 9:30PM ET where you can trick your ride, then race it on the open road or drag strip.

How would you like to have your face bounce up and down your website talking to visitors in a flash overlaid bubble?

Ok, so it's not cool, and it seems kind of annoying when checking out the demo, but it does have its uses. Bubble Guru helps users deliver clear messages through a video displayed on websites, with no massive website reworking. It works by recording a message from within a browser using a webcam, or attached video device in a Flash recorder. After recording you can test it out to see what it will look like on your website, and move forward by placing a string of HTML text on pages where you want the video displayed.

The service is free until May 1st if you would like to check it out and test its capabilities for your integrations. After that date, I guess you have to pay. No word on prices yet.

[via webware]

Oh, how I love free things. Especially free pretty things. And I'm the kind of person who things Flash charts and graphs are pretty, so I present amCharts and PHP/SWF Charts. amCharts is a relative newcomer that creates attractive Flash pie and donut charts based on data you put in a text file in either XML or CSV formats (which makes exporting from Excel easy). It's very configurable, allowing you to specify colors, border, tilt (for a 3D effect), labels, fonts, backgrounds, and so on. amCharts' creators promise bar, column, and line charts this spring.

PHP/SWF Charts is sort of amCharts' big brother. It's been around awhile longer and features more than a dozen different chart types and nearly unlimited configurability. As the name implies, PHP/SWF Charts uses PHP to load data from dynamic sources, but it's not required--there's XML/SWF Charts that will load data from a regular XML file. With its advanced features comes more complexity, of course, and the learning curve is probably greater, but if you need, say, a stacked 3D column chart, it's the way to go.

As I mentioned, both charting tools are free, but not totally free. The free version of amCharts will put a small link to amCharts.com in the corner of your charts, and PHP/SWF Charts will direct users to its web site if they click on it. For a single-site license amCharts will cost you 45 Euros (about US$60) and PHP/SWF charts will cost you US$45. "Enterprise" licenses for unlimited sites cost 245 Euros (~US$322) or $550 respectively.

So you're building a web site and want users to upload files--lots of files at once. Using an ordinary HTML file dialog is easy and gets the job done, but if the user wants to upload 30 files he has to click on a "Browse..." button 30 times and select each file one at a time. Some sites, like Flickr, solved this problem with a downloadable desktop app. Others used Java applets. And then along came Flash 8, which had perhaps the most promising solution: Built-in support for uploading multiple files at once. Brilliant! However, harnessing this power was not simple--it required, for one thing, a copy of Flash MX, which ain't cheap, not to mention the actual knowledge to use it.

By now I'm sure you know where I'm going with this: SWFUpload. It's an open source Flash widget that lets you add multiple simultaneous file uploads to your web service without spending so much as a cent. It's fairly robust, allowing you to specify your own custom graphics and dimensions for the upload button, choose which file types will be allowed, as well as JavaScript callback functions for showing upload progress, errors, and so on. And like I said, it's open source, so if you do happen to have Flash MX and some skills, you can tweak the .FLA source til your heart's content. Very cool.

Flash is wonderful, Flash is good, not everyone uses it, but everyone should. And if you can't afford Flash I found a little app that lets you create presentations that turn into those nifty little SWF's. It's called Wink, by the good folks over at DebugMode. I've seen it used on several sites to demonstrate software. Not only does it grab screenshots (complete with cursor movement), you can also add simple buttons, textboxes, and titles. Just the thing for simple training videos. Did I mention it's Windows and Linux compatible?