Someone forwarded me a link to this today and I was absolutely blown away. I spend the majority of my time creating reporting dashboards for my current employer, and Google Analytics is very similar to the solutions we try to achieve at the office.

In addition, I use Google Analytics for stats tracking on my own personal sites, and while their interface for use is great, I love the fact that Nicolas has put together a Flex/AIR interface for this. I'll be getting involved in testing/giving feedback, and I'd encourage others to check it out and do the same. I'd like to think this blog appeals to the more "charting-oriented" of us, so hopefully there's a few of you who will enjoy this as much as I do... :-)

http://www.aboutnico.be/index.php/google-analytics-air-beta-sign-up/

So here's the code as I promised. There is still a minor bug I'm going to work out with the range drag to the extreme right, and will repost with updated code once fixed. But for now, enjoy.

Samples Index - Right click for source

So I gave a presentation at the Silvafug meeting at Adobe in San Jose last night on Flex Charting. I struggled on what to give the talk on up until about a week ago. I finally decided to continue with the basic range selection example I'd done a few months ago, and create a "Google Finance" app in Flex, with all (or almost all) the functionality that the Google app offers.

While the presentation was exciting and fun to do, I think my last minute prep, and the fact I haven't spoken in public for many many many years resulted in a less than stellar walk-through of the functionality involved. However, the experience and feedback gained from last night was HUGE. I realized how I can improve the presentation 1000% percent, and plan on doing so before I give my talk in Seattle at 360Flex on August 13th (at least that's the tentative date.

Today I'm posting the app for everyone to play around, but am holding off on posting the code until Seattle (I don't want to steal my own thunder). However, I fully intend to release both the code-base, and an associated swc file for everyone to use, and integrate their own data into this type of interface. Hopefully this might entice the fence-sitters to attend 360 in August if you're interested in this kind of stuff.

I will say that it's not complicated stuff... and everyone and anyone should be able to insert their own data, or adapt the UI to fit their own project needs.

So here's the app... (click the image to view)

I've finally posted my Flex Charting Annotation sample and source code over on my personal blog... http://www.visualconcepts.ca/blog/

I was asked about how to introduce milestones by a co-worker the other day and did up this little example to help her out. I realized then that for Flex beginners the dataTransform and annotationElements might be confusing, so hopefully this helps others out too.

A really basic example of using annotationElements and the dataTransform methods to transform horizontal axis values to coordinate values. It draws an HRule instance at the selected horizontalAxis point and provides a button to link to details re: the milestone point.

http://www.stretchmedia.ca/code_examples/chart_milestone/main.html

After the great feedback I've gotten from the previous post, I decided to add a tad bit more functionality... namely the ability to drag the upper and lower selected chart areas. Same link as before... just click and drag...

http://www.stretchmedia.ca/code_examples/chart_range_selection/main.html

So I noticed some posts re: this type of component on flexcoders the other day, and being that I was bored at work on this sunny Friday afternoon, decided to give it a whirl. Right click to view source inside app...

http://www.stretchmedia.ca/code_examples/chart_range_selection/main.html

After I finished putting this together (in all of 45 minutes) I was as giddy as a little kid because it's just so damn COOL... Yeah, it doesn't have all the bell's and whistles that the graphing on Google Finance has, but still, can you imagine how long this effect would have taken to do in Flash?

Three words... "I love Flex"...

Have to give credit to Ely Greenfield (for his data generation function, and let's face it, for being The Man) as well as Doug McCune for his Dual Slider component (which is better than the one I did, which is why I used it here).

I got sick of doing the calculations to determine the offset values for my ColumCharts so I put together this little app to do it for me. Thought others might find it useful as well.

View Calculator >>

Thanks to Ely Greenfield (www.quietlyscheming.com) for the inspiration and calculations, and to Ben Lucyk (www.esria.com) for the suggestions on improvement (sample chart and code).

A sneak peek into the Flex charting annotation project I'm currently working on at 'a company'... the company has been fantastic about allowing me to publicly release a lot of the development and ideas we're coming up with here. Moving forward in the next few weeks, I'll hopefully be able to release the code for others to use/critique/applaud... :)

Sorry for the large download size, and the fact it's still just a movie. I created this for a presentation by my colleague Bruce Boston for an Emetrics conference he attended and presented at last week. If you skip about half-way through you'll see the annotation portion.

http://www.visualconcepts.ca/blog/attachments/CNET Charts Demo.zip