This could be a gift from the gods or the devil himself depending on your point of view. We’ve found a few sites like Ultrashock and Flash Den offering prepackaged pieces of flash functionality you can customize to varying degrees, that are for the most part fairly simple to implement.
While these are certainly not the end all and be all of flash development, and in our opinion don’t really qualify as a design solutions (since they won’t make your type, color palette layout, or photography any better), they are certainly useful for many light weight flash tricks applications. If per say, you want an easily to update xml driven slideshow, you’d be foolish to hire a developer with programs like Slideshow Pro and Autoviewer available for less than $50.
In fact we think this sets the bar higher for innovative flash development, because if you want to do something ground breaking it’s going to have to go beyond what you can buy for the cost of a power lunch. We long for the day this kind of functionality gets incorporated into flash itself, because a lot of these ideas look like the equivalent of a filter, tool, or palette you’d find in CS3. It makes design all that much more important, because once cool flash tricks become off the shelf solutions, you can get back to the little things like usability and visual narrative. We’re just sayin.
As a note, you can’t get a program to do good typography (which for our money will make or break you as a good designer), but we caught some of Lynda.com’s typographic principles, and they we’re pretty much exactly what we (and Lynda) got in Type 1 at Art Center.

If you still think of “art” as painting, we’re proud to introduce you to your first piece of online art. The Whitney Music Box was created by our friend Jim Bumgardner as “a musical realization of the motion graphics of John Whitney as described in his book digital harmony.”

In three minutes, the largest dot will travel around the circle once, the next largest dot will travel around the circle twice, the next largest dot three times, and so on.

The dots are arranged to trigger notes on a chromatic scale when they pass the line and generate music using synthesis software of Bumgardeners own design. If you’re a fan of mathematically generated work like Robert Hodgkins Flight 404, the Whitney Music Box works on a similar principle, but adds an audio element and was entirely programmed in flash actionscript.

When not busy being an actionscript guru during the day at Yahoo Music, Bumgardner comes up with interesting new interactive experiments which you can see on his sites including krazydad.com and coverpop.com. We’d like to nominate Jim up for quote of the year, because we’d die to see him walk into a meeting and tell everyone “Personally, I think utility is overrated.”

Linkdup is our favorite resource for finding the bleeding edge in flash technology. Virtually all groundbreaking and award winning flash sites are shown here. They also have a fantastic categorized archive to help you find all the flash goodness you’re looking for.