If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the new Yahoo! Finance (Beta) including the new charts built in Flash. I think the finance team did a beautiful job on the new Flash charts. At the beginning of the project, Finance didn’t have any Flash developers. Rather than going down the hiring route for getting Flash expertise, they trained themselves and really knocked everyone’s socks off here.

You may also notice that the side panel of the charts is HTML-based. The finance group decided to go with a hybrid AJAX/Flash application. While I prefer Flash solutions overall for a variety of reasons, I think the overall feel is excellent. Without right clicking I wouldn’t know where one technology stopped and the other begins, just as it should be.

To check out some of the features of the charts, try comparing some different stock symbols, the graphing styles and most importantly the technical indicators. The technical indicators are very interesting modules that provide different perspectives on the displayed data. In addition though, they actually give information for novices such as me to know just what the heck I am looking at.

After a tough decision, I’ve decided it is time to move on from Yahoo! and accept a very exciting position at Adobe. Starting in about a week, I will be Sr. Product Manager for Designer/Developer Relations for Flash. I will also be product managing a designer/developer workflow project, but more on that later (when I know more about it ) . It looks like I will be splitting my time between the San Francisco and San Jose offices and will get the best of both worlds.

For now, I am wrapping up my projects at Yahoo! and will have to start the very long process of packing up my cube soon! After four years and six cubes, it will be very strange to not be surrounded by purple and yellow. On the upside (if it is a downside to get away from purple and yellow), I am very happy that my new position will give me a lot of opportunities to continue to interact with the Flash users at Yahoo! while working on a product that I am really passionate about.

Once I make the transition and am up to speed at Adobe I will start posting some more about the new job. While still at Yahoo!, I should mention that the Yahoo! Flash platform team is still hiring, so get your resume in (I’ve transitioned the hiring process, so emailing me about it won’t help much). I would also add that at Yahoo! I have had the opportunity of working with a lot of great people, but my manager, Thomas Sha is fantastic. I really regret that I won’t get to work for him more; but any skilled frontend developer should be tripping over themselves to work as part of his team.

Ok, so all of you folks that I have talked to over the years that don’t use Yahoo! Messenger because all of their friends are on MSN no longer have any excuses. Yahoo! Messenger/MSN Messenger interop is finally here. Go to Messenger.yahoo.com (or some MSN link that I can’t recall) and sign up for the interop beta.

For those of you that are already using the Messenger 8 beta, you will still need to go to the messenger site to sign up. Once added to the interop beta, you will be asked to sign out, then sign in again. At that point you can start adding your MSN contacts.

For you Flash users out there, now is the time to sign up for Yahoo! Messenger. While the interop goes both ways, it is much better to have a Y! account and interop with the MSN folks rather than vice versa. With a Yahoo! account and Y! Messenger client, you can build Flash plugins of your own. So come on over and support the messenger client that actually uses Flash.