Hi Alfred,
How do you intend to incorporate the portal mashup demo? I have been having a look at it for our implementation and have managed to incorporate the shade effects into the portals to some degree, however this caused a strange error with custom portal administration. I was using a new theme I added through new-portal and the ajaxhelper api.
The effects look nice but I haven't been able to pass the neccessary variables to remember the portal state. (eg minimized of maximized)
Matthew