It's always inspiring to meet smart young people who are both passionate and skilled in the art and science of making software.

Well done, team!

Download the Parallel Watch Visualizers: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/384b40c9-b27f-4e32-a4df-1aab4c4c9c27

See more details at the Concurrency Visualizer team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualizeparallel/.

In this app, you can filter games by developer/publisher, genre, device, price, recent activity, version updates, features, ranking and more. You can also display the games in a grid or in columns and can zoom in and out on the selection using a slider.

Zoomappy is only the first of many for the startup, reports LiveSide. Future Pivot-enabled apps will include one for App Store books, one for App Store Entertainment, one for the Android Market and one for the Windows Marketplace.

The Code, SQL script is available here.

In the demo, Flake showed how Pivot could be used to browse a magazine’s archives, Wikipedia, and even your own web browser’s search history. If you have five minutes to spare, the TED video is definitely worth a look.

Using www.bing.com/visualsearch, you can perform web searches and see the results in a 3D-like grid of images. With the filters on the left, you can narrow down these results in order to see just what you’re looking for. Obviously, not all web searches benefit from visualization, but many do. For example, at launch time, some of the 100 or so of the already enabled categories included things like product searches, book searches, car searches, and searches for dog breeds, sports teams and more.

Now you can add “iPhone apps” to that list. As the MediaBistro blog noticed, using Bing is an excellent way to find new iPhone applications. After doing a search for top iPhone apps, you’re presented with a screen that displays the apps’ icons as thumbnails you can scroll through.

Filters on the left let you narrow the search by top free, top paid, newest, most expensive, top games, top entertainment, or top social networking. You can also narrow results by application category (finance, games, lifestyle, music, etc.), price, or publisher.

When you find an app you like, you can click on its thumbnail to be taken to a Bing search result page for its name where you’ll find links to its website, reviews, relevant articles, and more.

As it turns out, this is actually a much better way to navigate through the thousands of available applications than using Apple’s own iTunes software. And yes – surprise, surprise – it’s from Microsoft.

Obviously, a visual search works better for some queries than for others. In the Bing blog post, for example, they showed examples of visual searches for products, books, and cars. But that’s only scratching the surface. You can visualize almost anything – from dog breeds to sports teams. In fact, there are over 100 visual categories already enabled for the new interface. The Visual Search homepage offers up a few “featured galleries” to get you started. 

As you re-sort and filter your results using the links provided on the left side of the results page, the images fly across the screen, moving into their new positions. It’s a beautiful example of what Silverlight technology is capable of doing.

Visual search engines have been around for some time, but never has a major search company integrated visual search like this into their own engine. Surprisingly, the end result isn’t just a page of visual eye candy, but an useful interface that actually makes finding what you needed quicker and easier than before.

This app is also featured in the Seadragon Gallery over on the Live Labs site, but that one isn’t searchable. If you’re into visualizations, though, the Live Labs Seadragon gallery is worth checking out –there are some pretty amazing visualizations embedded over there.

The four available visualizations are as follows:

1. The Obesity Epidemic: this one addresses concerns about the ever growing obesity problem in the U.S. It uses Silverlight to show Tee-Shirt sizes as a way to help people visualize obesity. The Silverlight application relays statistical information via the DOM to the web page for display. Selection of the obesity rate data is done using LINQ queries on an external XML data file.
2. Their First Words displays incidences of word usage for a given word search of presidential inaugural addresses. This sample shows tight the integration between Silverlight and the HTML DOM, and they show search results using the advanced text rendering capabilities of the browser. A squarified TreeMap displays word search results by employing advanced LINQ queries against the inaugural data.
3. A Website Named Desire is an interactive infographic of the amorphous web site creation process, began as a real world poster that we wished to move onto the web. This project enhances the real world experience by enabling annotation of high resolution graphical content with markers, Canvases which scale, slide and are interactive, in a compelling and intuitive way.
4. The Social Timeline is an interactive visualization which allows users to download FriendFeed entries for a particular FriendFeed user, view them on a timeline and pivot on this data in several ways. This sample demonstrates some advanced control concepts such as virtualization and theming.

On a personal level as a FriendFeed user, I’m loving that last one. I can see all my friends’ posts on a timeline, filter the friend list, filter posts to only see those with likes or comments, filter by services, and more. Although it may not be the way I’ll go an read through FriendFeed every day, it’s a pretty amazing real-time visualization of my network.