Google Analytics on AIR

Saw this preview of Google Analytics implemented on the Adobe AIR platform. Very interesting and unique application. It should be relatively easy to implement in WPF, but make it across platforms, AIR looks more promising than WPF.

I am learning bits of AIR and Flex recently, so this blog is bit lacking of new WPF, XAML updates. 🙂

A peek into Flex2/ActionScript3 world

Being a heavy-Microsoft-centric technologist for so many years, I just happened to take a quick and very skin-deep peek into the Adobe Flex 2/ ActionScript 3 world of development. Though admittedly my very basic and limited knowledge of Flex/AS, I see both the power/beauty of Flex as well as the limitations of the platform. I am sure the list will grow longer when I dive more into this amazing Adobe platform.

• Richer class library of animations. Flex2/AS seems have more support for real-life 2D animations than WPF/XAML offers
• Multi-threading or lack of it: As far as I learned, seems there is not much multi-threading support on the Flex/AS platform. While WPF / XAML, through its underlying .Net Framework 2.0/3.0, the support for multi-threading is very strong and inherited.
• Some useful and richer UI classes in Flex2 that cannot be found in WPF/XAML. I wish I can find better built-in support for charting (at least 2D charting) as we see in the Flex2. This is one of the areas in WPF/XAML I’d like to see more improvement. Although we can accomplish 2D interactive charting in WPF/XAML with little efforts, having a built-in, standard support can save a lot of development/support time in many business applications.

• Media support. Flex2 has more support for types of media than WPF/XAML has. Also the MediaElement in WPF/XAML only works with the latest (or at least version 10) of Windows Media, which is really a drawback. Why not support for YouTube Google Video or other popular internet video format also? Why not support Flash movie also? WPF is definitely lagging behind Flex in this area