RefreshingApps.com

Ah the Google Analytics reporting tool by Nicholas Lierman, how could I not have reviewed this before! Well I have been using it over the last few weeks while monitoring the stats of freshAIRapps and my blog giving it a damn good test.

This is another application that has been doing the rounds since the early days of the AIR beta so just like the eBay desktop application, bugs are getting ironed out and new features added. The GA reporting suite is currently up to version 0.51 and labelled as beta 3 although from his blog it looks like release version 1.0 is not far off.

I saw Nicholas give a great presentation at this years FITC in Amsterdam titled ‘Data visualization with Flex and AIR’. He showed the reporting suite and gave a look at how he was working with data from Google Analytics.

Just like ReadAIR with Google Reader, there is no publicly available API for Analytics so Nicholas started from scratch in ActionScript 3. He dissected the JavaScript and calls the web app was making and then recreated the logic inside his own API. That is crazy! Apparently Nicholas is now working alongside some of the Google guys and an ActionScript 3 GA API might well be on the cards for the future.

I really like this application. It is fast responsive and gives me advantages over using the web application provided by Google. One of the advantages of AIR is I can save out my analytics data into PDF, Excel or XML format from any data view.

When you select a view option from the menu it populates a new tab on the main screen. This aides usability by giving the user the option of quickly switching back to previously viewed data and states.

Some small things I don’t like. If I am part way through viewing my analytics data and select ‘manage profiles’ the choose to simply ‘go back’, I have to still select the profile I was viewing which loses all of my open tabs. It looks like it starts a new dashboard session.

The site overlay feature was very complex to achieve says Nicholas but I think he has pulled it off extremely well and with a single click another tab appears showing your site overlayed with click data.

Another thing, when a graph is shown on the main screen if I choose to display another option from the drop down menu like Average Time on Site. When the menu closes it still says visits as the selected option even though I am actually viewing something else. Paying attention to the small details will make for a better allround user experience.

Don’t let this detract from the fantastic work that Nicholas has put into this great AIR application for Google Analytics. Give this a try and I don’t think you will go back to the web app any time soon.

Design eye

The app looks great with obvious design elements taken directly from the Google web based analytics app. This enables existing users to jump right in and start using the app.

I love the smooth transitions when you change graph data, yes I know that it is default Flex but it just adds to the extra value you get by running this AIR application.

The data is presented well and only on a few occasions did I experience unwanted scrollbars on some data rows.

From one of Nicholas’ blog posts it seems that themes could make it into the next release as he was gauging opinions on a dark theme. Some interesting opinions in the comments about the comparison between the dark and light themes options.

Technical eye

Built using Adobe Flex 3 with a custom built ActionScript 3 API for Google Analytics. The application makes use of Flex’s charting engine.