Nothing Earth-shattering or anything, but I made a couple nice updates to my WordWeb Flex application for Digg. They’re a big help in regards to user experience and making the app a little more fun to play with.

First, the floating keyword list now includes real-time filtering. I had a couple people mention that they found themselves thinking of words that they wanted to view in the graph, but there was no easy way to find them without scrolling through the whole list. Now you can start typing the word you want in the search box and the list will update immediately. It’s pretty slick.

Second, I updated the settings dialog to make picking topics easier. Digg’s API contains a series of containers (top-level categories) and topics (sub-categories). The previous interface I had was a little confusing to use because I didn’t make any connections between containers and topics. Now, when you select a container from a ComboBox, you will be presented with a new ComboBox (and a nice transition effect) that contains the sub-topics from the container. A cancel button appears next to each ComboBox to let you easily clear the chosen values. Like the keyword filtering, this enhancement makes user choices a little more manageable by limiting the amount of information the user needs to see at one time.

If you’d like to learn more about this app, please see the original post about WordWeb. I made the source code available for viewing as well, so take a peek if you’re interested.