Impressive Adobe AIR Application - Google Analytics Suite

Once again I have been impressed by AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime. I can see massive advantages of an app environment like this even if I have some requirements that are not available.

2007-10-06 17:41:00.0

Impressive Adobe AIR Application - Google Analytics Suite

Once again I have been impressed by AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime. I can see massive advantages of an app environment like this even if I have some requirements that are not available.

Anyway, we use Google Analytics for client projects and our own websites and I always found the interface a little bit confusing. The left hand menu was structured Marketing, Developer etc and I had no idea where anything was.

The AIR Application Google Analytics Suite solves this problem by structuring the left menu under the categories:

  • Visitors
  • Traffic Sources
  • Content

The interface is beautiful and importantly its snappy! I love the fact you can have multiple tabs open! One gripe would be to have some persistance in the application to remember open tabs, date range picked etc.

I really really wish AIR supported the following:

  • Right Click Menus
  • System Notification Area Support (Minimise to Tray) - I really want this!!!

If the above was available I will ditch C# .NET as my language of choice for writing the Teamwork Project Manager Desktop Application. I could have a truely cross platorm desktop app.

There is one thing I am unclear about and hoping somebody can answer.....what browser is used on Mac and Linux inside AIR?? I am guessing the Windows AIR uses IE.

posted by Daniel Mackey @ 05:41PM - Saturday 06 October 2007  

Tags: Adobe AIR | Apollo | Teamwork Project Manager
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Comments

Chafic Kazoun said:
AIR does support both features that is on your list.

1. Right click menus are built into Flash Player. Check out the ContextMenu class. Flex components don't make use of them much.
2. For the system notification area, it supports that as well as of Beta 2. Check out the employee directory sample application http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/samples/ for an example if it and source of the sample.

As for the web browser inside AIR. It uses the webkit rendering engine. It is the one used by Safari and many mobile browsers including the iPhone and most modern Nokia phones.
Daniel Mackey said:
Hi Chafic! That is fantastic! Just a couple of questions seeing as you are in the know :

1) Can the right click be a custom drawn area or is it the standard flash extendable one with the Flash... menu item still in it?

2) Does the PC AIR use Webkit aswell?

I will definately look into a bit of AIR development! I have a few apps in mind that I would love to be cross platform.

Thanks again for the info,
Dan.
Aran Rhee said:
Dan.

Webkit - My understanding is that all version of AIR use the webkit engine so that you will get consistent results no matter what platform you deploy to :) (like flash player)

Right click - according to a devnet article you should have "full right-click context menu control" which I think would mean no standard flash menu if you didn't want it, but probably no custom artwork (my guess)
Paulius Uza said:
Latest version of AIR (beta 2) has full right click support, that means you can capture the right click event, prevent the context menu from showing, and then do anything you want (like display a custom graphic instead of menu)
Chafic Kazoun said:
Daniel,

PC AIR uses Webkit as well. Not sure about ContextMenu stuff in AIR but I know it is in there somewhere