Want to have power over your own news content? Well then welcome to the Filtrbox RSS feed. As a Filtrbox member (its a FREE account), you have the ability to create your own RSS feeds and manage how the content is filtered. What does this mean for developers? This will give you the ability to set up a feed for say “Adobe AIR”, and use Filtrbox to manage the content. Managing the content allows you to choose how many articles are displayed, amount of history in days, and the quality ranking of the article. Once  you have setup a feed, it then becomes as easy as consuming it. Most mashups consist of maps, graphing or basic interactions between multiple components that share relevancy with one another. With the ability to manage your own content sources, you become in control of your application and will not have to rely on restriction based upon the source. Dealing with restriction like the integration of Yahoo maps before the AS3 api, was troublesome and limited in its context.

When using the Filtrbox RSS, you have two options, either consume the RSS as is, or if you are passing the feed through flash embed variables, you will have to base 64 Decode the content. Using the feed in Flex is as easy as an HTTPService request. Here is an example of a Base 64 decoder to use:

import mx.utils.Base64Decoder;
var decoder:Base64Decoder = new Base64Decoder();
// this is decoding the embed variables that are passed in
decoder.decode(Application.application.parameters.source);
var byteArray:ByteArray = decoder.flush();
var src:String = byteArray.readUTFBytes(byteArray.length);
mw.source = ‘http://www.filtrbox.com/rss/’+src;

So lately I have been interested in the Tour de France and wanted to create a quick app centered around that. The requirement of the app was to display the most up to date quality news about the Tour de France on my desktop as a widget. With the power of Filtrbox, I can add exclusions like steroids or other thing that i really dont want to deal with. Below is a screenshot of the app in AIR - I will post a download link soon with source code once I  clean it up and better leverage some of the new features in AIR. If you just want to add the feed to your personal blog, you can embed code for the Filtrbox widget from the Filtrbox dashboard, that is built in Flex and is constantly developing and expanding into new semantic search territory.

Today was the official launch of Filtrbox.com and its rich dashboard application. The idea behind Filtrbox is to provide a cure for information overload in a new and cost effective manner. Get this: “Built using Flex, the Filtrbox UI uses drag and drop, asynchronous and background updates, sophisticated graphing, user input validation, and dynamic screen layout to provide a smooth, low-drag user experience. This UI demonstrates that no matter how good your AJAX UI might be Flex will run rings around it.” -Mark Gibbs , Network World.

Now thats some sweet press. We really enjoyed building the UI and have really incorporated great features and components from Flex and the Flex community. It is great to have the new UI out and functional and highlighting the great features that Filtrbox has to offer. Stuff like Importing of Google analytics, the ability to search through archived news, seamlessly create, add, group filtrs( a Filtrbox search term), and analysis. Just to clarify, we do allow Google Alerts imports, and that is one of my favs. So now you can imports your alerts, and Filtrbox will consume them, in a easy to use interface that allow for sorting and filtering of archived data - hell ya.

We still have some awesome features up our sleeves, and you may possibly see a Filtrbox icon on your desktop (its and Adobe thing) soon. Many have wondered what presence Flex would play in Web 3.0 and what it means for a truly rich internet experience, but i hope at least some of these questions have been answered by Filtrbox and their commitment to an awesome user experience. This blog will become a place that highlights new features, thoughts, code examples, and over all news on what Filtrbox is doing and what it means to the Flex community.

Just a quick history if you dont want to read it at Filtrbox.com : Filtrbox was conceived by Ari Newman(The man with a plan) and Tom Chikoore( Mr. T - “I pity the fool”) and built by their main code monkey, Bruce Deen (Drinker of the Zima). I came on recently and redesigned the present UI that we launched with today. The new UI was completed in less than a month, thank you Mountain Dew for your support, and i hope that it can be considered a positive step forward for the integration of semantic search and RIA UIs. The application was conceived to bring about a new cost effective way to manage semantic news by giving you the ability to control your information and presentation.   Being a small company, most of us have been awake for almost 48 hours, testing and deploying the application for you. I look forward to comments and feedback from user experiences and am just happy bring a new niche for Flex to the market.

Take some time out of your monday and check out Filtrbox.com