Adobe AIR Bouncing Ball

I've created a little bouncing ball sample for Adobe AIR (derivative of course of our stock Boxely example some of you may be familiar with). You simply run the AIR applet and the ball will do its thing. You can pick it up and toss it as well and it will be constrained to your primary display.


I just wanted to demonstrate to the Adobe folks that their system capabilities class is not quite enough to do tight integration with the user's desktop. In this case for example, we'd prefer to know the user's "work area" size and position rather than the monitor resolution, for example so as not to go behind the taskbar on Windows or if the taskbar is docked to the top of the screen to know that the work area is not oriented at 0,0. Apparently there is a 'Screen' class coming soon?

Very simple code, the source is available on request. I just snag screenResolutionX and screenResolutionY from flash.system.Capabilities, and then let a gravity and elastic constant affect the ball position on the desktop. The ball itself of course is just a 60x60 SWF - over time I'm simply setting and resetting stage.window.x and stage.window.y ... when the user grabs the ball, I kick into a system managed drag via stage.window.startMove() and monitor the balls position in a frame handler.

AIR is starting to show some promise but still missing a few fundamentals.

Download the AIR file here.

Google Analytics

I've been wading through Omniture SiteCatalyst reports for the past week or so, analyzing site traffic for several new websites we've released here at AOL. I can only imagine the subscription rate we're paying Omniture for their services, given the fact that AOL is an enterprise ripe for the picking and all. Their technology and tools are very very powerful however and I got to wondering if there were any comparable tools for us common folk.

I'm new to the analytics world so I'm sure I am sounding quite ignorant. But long story short I've always gathered what I needed from the simple reports my ISP provides me for my domain and domain applications. Most ISP dashboards provide top referrer lists (e.g. where you traffic comes from, the search terms used folks stumble across your site, who's talking about something on your website etc.).

The power of the commercial analytics tools come in when you wish to compare and contrast traffic over time, correlate traffic spikes (or dips) with content you've posted, and determine what path consumers are taking through your site (what pages they view, the order, and how they most often exit).

If you are like me and enjoy micromanaging your site and really understanding what people like about your site or what makes a popular post, or want to grow your audience systematically - give Google's Analytics service a shot. The UI is great (in many cases better than the costly competitors like Omniture), it's FREE, and it's actually fun to use.



Instructions can be found on the Google Analytics site itself, but essentially all you need to do is paste a few lines of script into your site markup and the rest will happen automatically. Just note that you'll need to wait around 48-72 hours (a bit longer than the 24 they mention in their FAQ) to start seeing useful data roll in.

Update: If you aren't entirely sold by my modest acclaim of Google Analytics, check out this great summary of the reasons Google's tool is in fact a best-in-breed contender.