Designing Executive Dashboards by Tom Gonzalez

For all those in RIA field, Dashboard is not a new word. In fact it is one of main most asked for requirement in the RIA space.

Tom Gonzalez is the founder and Managing Director of BrightPoint Consulting, and has a wonderful article on Designing Dashboards: Part 1 , Part 2 and Choosing Correct Metrics & KPIs .

I would highly recommend reading this article.

Widget Library

There are some amazing widget libraries out there and one such library is http://www.gwt-ext.com

what i liked in this site is the way the content is organised. the whole site itself is created by the widgets they are show casing.

worth a visit :)

RIA Company watch - Effective UI

I have been looking at latest RIA tools and services all these while. One thought came into my mind as to who are the people behind them and how are they defining their solutions/services.

The first of my series is Effective UI.

These are the people behind ebay's AIR desktop tool and few other Discover channel application. The reason why they require a special mention is that the number of downloads for ebay desktop tool has crossed 1 million downloads.

They also follow my doctrine of integrating Usability with RIA technology. Everything said for any application Usability comes first and then comes the technology used to deliver it.

FLEX-3 Tutorials - For Beginers

Lots of people have been asking me for good Flex tutorials. So i have decided to post such good tutorials as and when i come across them.

To start with here is one such good tutorial. I would highly recommend this for first timers.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/beginners-tutorial-flex-3

Flex Office tools

MS office tools have been getting stiff competition from AJAX based online office tools. Now Adobe Flex has entered the ring and are coming out with some really cool web based office tools.

There is no single office suite yet in Flex. Samir Bhatia is working on one such suite called Live Documents. Which offers Word, Excel and Powerpoint tools.

While we are waiting for that, there are people focusing on one of the above and really bringing out some amazing Flex based office tools.

I would recomend the following

Slide Rocket - For PPT features. This has cool features of Mac Keynote. Making it more attractive.

Buzzword - for word documents

idubee for Excel spreadsheets.

There are more tools available and more being launched as i am typing this. So if anyone knows these tools pl do add it to this post.

Want your picture on a Magazine Cover???

Who doesnt :D.

Well the wish come true at Mag my Pic (http://www.magmypic.com).

Its one of those fun RIA sites where technology simplifies our wishes ;)

One can share the final magazine cover with friends and ask them to vote on it. The results can be associated with our email. The code can be pasted on to our blog and many more features are there.

Check out my pic on Style Magazine.

Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com

Data Visualization in Sports web sites

While we are seeing a increase in the usage of RIA technologies in sports web sites, they have been predominently for video streaming and blog purposes.

Now they have brought in data visualization of the tonnes of data they have. Check out the "Stats Machine" tool of NHL (National Hockey League. Its Java based so dont expect the richness of Flex. However this is a good start and pretty neat in terms of functionalities.

http://www.nhl.com/cgi-bin/superstats/process_stats.cgi?source=NHL.com&statType=team&seasonType=playoff&season=20072008

Flash Plugin touches 12 million downloads per day?

Not only due 98-99% of the browsers in the world have the Flash Plug-in but has about 12 million downloads per day.

This should be a bigger push when trying to sell Flex technology :)

However - i read about the 12 million statistics, but am yet to come across proof of the same.will post the same as soon i get my hands on them.

Some general statistics about Flash player penetration:-

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/PC.html

RIA For mobile devices

I have been trying to come up with a RIA POC for mobile devices. However the main constraint has been to zero in on the right RIA technology.

I found a good blog on the same topic in jajahdevblog.com. I would recomend this blog highly.

http://jajahdevblog.com/guy/2008/03/30/ria-on-the-mobile-phones-and-small-devices/

3D Interactive Video using Flash & ActionScript 3

Now this is what i call a video - a real interactive video. Imagine a video where you can decide which angle and the depth (zoom) you want to see.

I would have expected this functionality in a advanced 3D or a movie software. But achieving this in Flash using ActionScript 3 is really awesome. This was achieved by the folks at Immersive Media, check out their videos - without fail (http://www.immersivemedia.com/)

This is going to be the next Youtube of videos :)

If you want to know how they do this - here is all the info u need (http://www.immersivemedia.com/demo/demo.php#)


Many thank to Aasim for sharing this link with me :)

Flex based search engine

Vizzl - The Visual Search Tool.

A really cool search engine. But only to search within sites like Amazon, ebay and youtube. The power of sorting the search reults is show cased here.

A must use tool if you a online shopping freak.

http://www.vizzl.com/