Posts Tagged RIA
2 new tools for The Home Depot: considering carpet and treat your windows
Posted by zedia.net in Twist Image on July 31st, 2009
I haven’t written in the last month or so and I wanted to put an end to this. Two new Twist Image productions were just put live for The Home Depot : considering carpet and treat your windows. They are basically tools to help you choose carpets and window coverings. While I can’t say that I was as much involved with those project that the 3 before (think in colour, redefining floors and transition to tile), these projects have been really great at introducing the PureMVC framework to new developers. Since they didn’t have to build them from scratch because they are based a lot on the previous tools, these projects gave PureMVC a better learning curve and really showed them the advantages of using the framework. I didn’t have to do any convincing after that to get them to use PureMVC on every project we do.
The technologies used were about the same as the previous ones. This raises the number of tools we did for The Home Depot to 5 and our toolbox is nearly completed but stay tuned for something new in a near future.
Here are the links again:
Why I have been talking so much about Google Analytics lately
Posted by zedia.net in Google Analytics on June 18th, 2009
If you take a look at my 4-5 last post you’ll notice that they are all about Google Analytics, be it Google Analytics for Flash or Google Analytics Data API. There are a couple of good reasons for that.
A new presentation
First, I’m really proud (and scared) to say that I am going to give a presentation at the InsideRIA conference in August in San Jose. The topic will be Google Analytics For Flash so I’m mostly going to reuse my presentation I did for the Montreal Flash User Group but I will adapt it for RIAs and I will add a big part on how to retrieve the data you send to Google back in your RIA using Google Analytics Data API. So I need to shape up on those topics and learn every thing there is to learn so that I can give a presentation with great content.
A new application
Secondly, I have this great idea. I wasn’t going to blog about it at first until it was done but my motivation kinda withered so I hope that by exposing it here and getting feedback I will start working on it again. What I want to do is build a rich internet application that displays Google Analytics Data in a way that makes more sense for Flash website. Flash website differs from HTML website in a lot of ways but web analytics don’t display their data while taking these differences into consideration. If we only take preloading and videos, we could have insightful data visualization that would show how many people saw which section of your video (that could be a heat map representing the timeline of the video) or how many people started the preloading process but didn’t end it. Another area that I would like to tackle is to set a standard on how to use events.
Right now there is no clear guideline on how to use events. It’s really free for all and no one is doing the same thing, so when you go in someone else reports it takes a while to understand what is going on. So I would basically be creating a set of guidelines for Events and then my application would be interpreting them differently than Google Analytics. While I’m there I could also associate events with pageviews. What is disturbing right now is that with events you can know how many people clicked on your button but it is pretty hard to see how many people actually saw the button so it’s hard to tell if your interface is performing well.
Well that my plan, the first step was to be able to connect to Google Analytics Data API using Flash on a webserver which I found out how. Now what I have left to do is create the guidelines for events and the interpret the data from Google Analytics. If you got any feedback on my idea please put it in the comments; it would really motivate me to start working on it.
