Last week, we rolled out some new features, including improvements to the Members section, greater visibility for the ‘Bits feature, and major improvements to the search function.  Individual profiles pages were also redesigned. A new tab navigation system makes it easier to browse individuals’ contributions to the site and connect to social networking and file sharing sites. Check out my profile on the ExhibitFiles site to view the new functionalities. We will be rolling out a few other features and improvements to the site in the next month.

In other news, new research findings from a study of the ExhibitFiles community was posted on the ExhibitFiles blog today(see ExhibitFiles: a growing community).  The study was conducted by Carey Tisdal of Tisdal Consulting.  More research will be posted in the coming weeks.

Our tutorials have been some of the most visited pages on the GestureWorks support site and and we’re looking to expand the list even further. We’d love to hear suggestions on what kinds of tutorials you’d like to see on the site. Tweet us @gestureworks or comment on this post.

The GestureWorks team from Ideum is currently at Flashbelt 2010 in Minneapolis, MN. We want to learn how you are using (or plan to use) multitouch in your projects, and to discuss our road map for true multitouch in Flash, Flex and beyond.

Come by to say hi and talk to the lead developer of GestureWorks, Chris Gerber. We’re offering GestureWorks license discounts for Flashbelt participants. We’re also showcasing our MT-50 multiouch table and new 3M multitouch screen running GestureWorks-built applications.

So far our time here at FlashBelt 2010 has been great. We’ll continue to tweet selected presentations throughout the week. Follow us @gestureworks or search #flashbelt for updates.

If you’re attending AAM please stop by booth #1219 and check out our MT-50 Multitouch Table with a clear plexi-glass front panel.  We’re also showing off some of our custom applications on the new 3M 22″ multitouch display. On Sunday night, we will attend the AAM MUSE Awards and find out if our EM Spectrum exhibit 100″ Multitouch Table we developed with Adventure Science Center is a winner.

If you’re attending the AAM Monday night party, you can check out our multitouch table in action at The Getty!  They developed a custom exhibit using our own GestureWorks framework for Flash. The Getty’s Iris blog has a story about the exhibit, see: Exploring Los Angeles on a Multitouch Table.

On Wednesday night,  off to Seattle for the SID annual conference. Thursday is The Future of Touch & Interactivity Conference, with keynotes from multitouch “rock stars” Bill Buxton, Principle Researcher from Microsoft and Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel.  It should be an interesting day.

We will be tweeting from both GestureWorks and Ideum and using #AAM10 and #SID2010, if you’d like to follow. If you’re attending either of these conferences and would like to meet up, let us know.

We built GestureWorks to speed the development of our own multitouch and multiuser exhibits, but soon realized it this would be of value to others Flash developers. 

GestureWorks provides a single solution for the HP TouchSmart and Dell Studio One multitouch enabled computers. We include optimized drivers for the NextWindow (multitouch overlay) that comes with each of these systems. The framework  greatly speeds development in Flash.  It is also extremely efficient: multitouch enabled applications created with GestureWorks run faster, using significantly less CPU than those using other authoring approaches.  GestureWorks will be available for Mac OS X and Windows and will work with Adobe Flash CS3 and CS4.

Additionally, GestureWorks will ship free with our multitouch table, and it works in conjunction with NUI’s Snowflake software. You can see a full list of features and performance information on the GestureWorks site.

To be notified of the free public Alpha, you can join the mailing list on the GestureWorks site. You can also follow GestureWorks on Twitter.

Though we’ve just begun to build our own Twitter presence for Ideum and have personally been on Twitter since 2006 (www.twitter.com/jims), although I barely used the service at first. Recently, I’ve been more interested in the service, and I’ve come across a number of utilities that make Twitter much more useful and easier to integrate into other site. Here’s a round up of some of the better ones:

1. TwitterFeed. Last month, I blogged about TwitterFeed and mentioned how I’ve set this to send our latest blog posts from Ideum and featured mixes from RSS Mixer to Twitter.

2. TweetLater. This site allows you to schedule posts to Twitter. You can even set up automated thank you notes to new followers.

3. Ping.fm. You can update Twitter along with other social networking and microblogging sites like; Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Yahoo! 360, WordPress, and others. An alternative service is Hellotxt.

4. Twitter on Facebook. The Facebook application for Twitter.

5. Twitt.icio.us. A simple barebones utility that lets you import links from your Twitter account into your del.icio.us account.

6. Twitter Tools. A plug-in that integrates Twitter and WordPress.

7. Twitterbar. A Firefox tool bar for posting Websites to Twitter from your browser’s address bar.

8. Tweetr. A desktop utility for Mac and Windows that let’s you update your Twitter status. You can post photos, check updates, and more. Built with Adobe Air.

9. Twitteroo. Send messages to your Twitter account from your desktop for PC.

10. Twitterpost. A Mac-based desktop Twitter tool.

Another point to remember is that your Twitter presence has an RSS feed associated with it. This allows you to add your Twitter stream to any readers or RSS enabled widgets.  Finally, to learn more about Twitter and microblogging in general, you might want to take a look at TweetCrunch which is dedicated to the subject. If you know of any other useful utilities, feel free to add them to the comments.

This week we created a Twitter site for RSS Mixer. I wanted to find a way to help keep this Twitter site up-to-date without having to manually enter every update. I came across TwitterFeed which takes your RSS Feed and automatically posts updates to Twitter. It is simple to use and while it isn’t a replacement for manually adding updates, it certainly helps and saves you having to manually update every blog post to Twitter.