Another year is gone, and another gPumpkin contest has come to a close. Many a beer and chocolate was consumed, and overall it was a great break from our normal routine. Congratulations to Grant and Wes, whose pumpkin "The Horror of Corporate Conformity" took first place. Between Grant and Wes, one of them have been on the winning team each year. Conspiracy? Probably.

Highlights this year included:

• A landslide victory by the "Horror of Corporate Conformity", which sat at around triple the votes of the second place pumpkin
• Carving with steak knives instead of the traditional tools, which have been lost since last year
• The very first "dropped" pumpkin. It didn't break, but it took a good dive from the table.
• Phantom votes for a non-existent pumpkin, which showed up in the voting app. It turned out to be an old testing file

Overall it was great fun. We leave you with a shot of all the pumpkins together. See you all next year!

I've just wrapped up beta 3 of gTween. It's been a busy few weeks, and is just getting busier with the Korean Game Developer's Conference, and Adobe MAX around the corner, so it's not quite as well tested as I'd like, but it seems to be working without problem.

The main feature additions are support for 3D rotation with smartRotation (always rotates in the shortest direction), a rewrite of custom progress points to make them more robust and reliable, the addition of a global defaultEase property, and the ability to globally control what properties will be rounded.

Keeping with our yearly tradition of squash mutilation here at gskinner.com, I'm happy to present this year's Great Pumpkin Showdown.

We broke into teams of two, based on seniority, and hacked the crap out of a bunch of defenseless pumpkins while drinking beer, eating pizza, and gorging on candy. Also keeping with tradition, we made the most recent hires build out the pumpkin voting team.

This is our largest batch of jack'o'lanterns to date (five), and definitely our best voting app. Nice work freshmen!

Player 10 is required to view the app below.

Here's a simple tech demo showing a 3D music visualizer using the flash player 10's new 3D APIs, with a rotating sphere that transitions into a disc using GTween. Nothing too complex, but the result is kind of neat, and it is simple enough to serve as a quick entry into using the new APIs if you're getting started. It also uses the new Vector type in player 10.

To me its cool that you can now whip out simple 3D content right in Flash in a matter of minutes, and then step up to the big guns with PaperVision 3D or Away 3D as necessary.

I'll be sharing some of the other simple 3D experiments I've been working on over the coming weeks.