O’Reilly: Inside RIA

I was perusing the Google Code blog recently, and stumbled across a post explaining the new Google Browser Size tool. This is a tool that allows you to compare the size & layout of your design against data showing the most common browser sizes of client machines.

Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an excellent system of data compression and asynchronous loading. Today this power is available to everyone, since Google has released its magic tool under Apache 2 license.

In an interesting move Tuesday, Google released the "Chrome Frame", a plug-in that will allow you to run Google Chrome inside of Internet Explorer. This allows you to take advantage of HTML5 elements (including Canvas), and the V8 JavaScript engine, from within IE.

These are exciting times to be developing RIAs. All the barriers of the old mediums like print, tv, and now phones have transitioned over to the internet and been improved along the way to the point where the old mediums are almost irrelevant. It's only natural that traditional landlines will be put on the extinction chopping block. I never thought I would see the day where Flash would have the potential to replace my home phone. Looks like Google is building quite a communication empire for us to all play with.

No, this isn't my new perspective on using the Google Maps API. In fact, it's much more exciting. Google recently released a new addition to the Maps API for Flash, including 3D perspective, and a new control set that is reminiscent of the controls in Google Earth! Straight from Google: "With a perspective map, the map is projected on a viewport (the screen) using a virtual point of reference in front of the screen (the camera). These three components (the map, the viewport and the camera) form a perspective on the viewport which gives the illusion of depth perception to the map."

In this first mini part series, I'm going to be giving my two cents on ChromeOS and what it means for developers, end-users, and Google itself. To give you a clear view of my opinions, other then the Official Google Blog, i have not read or participated in any of the other discussion on ChromeOS.

Google Wave was all over the news last week when it was first shown at Google I/O. So, we thought it would be interesting to see if you care about Google Wave and, if so, which piece in particular you...

Here's a trick combining graphics filters with Google maps for some interesting effects. They don't necessarily make it easier to read the maps, nor do they have a lot of value, but they look interesting, and are fun to play with. I can't claim this idea as my own. I just randomly stumbled across this post on axismaps.com, and figured I'd throw together a Flex example showing how to do it.

Google recently released http://www.chromeexperiments.com/. It's a collection of Javascript-based experiments designed to show off the speed of the Google Chrome browser.

     The application FindMee on Facebook is a nice example of how ActionScript 3.0 can be used together with Google Maps API for Flash on Facebook to create simple but useful applications. The application itself can be used by travelers to...

Inspired by the initial returns of this weeks poll, I have decided to open source a new Flex library for Google Event Tracking that I have been working on and host it at http://code.google.com/p/riatrax/.

Google recently published a sample Flex application that demonstrated the Google Maps Flash API. Andrew Trice reported on the API last May. You can try the new demonstration application here. The application is pretty cool, but lacks some important features...

If you have used Google Analytics to monitor and analyze traffic on a website, you were most likely impressed with the ability it gave you to understand the nature of visits to and exits from the site, learn how visitors found it, discover how much time people spent there, et cetera. Recently, the Google Analytics team announced the availability of an open source, native AS3 API that enables you to utilize Google Analytics (GA) tracking from within your RIA.

The concept Geo-tagging data is not new. With GPS and cellular-network based geolocation available nearly everywhere, geographic information is showing up everywhere that it is applicable; cell phones, web sites, rss feeds, etc... It is the backbone of the "geoweb". There are numerous programs for geo-tagging your data, and you can even geotag your pictures from your iPhone, if you so choose. With the Google Earth API, you can take this information and publish it on an interactive globe for the entire web to see.

Friday Google announced a new RIA platform called Google Native Client (NaCl). NaCl provides a browser plug-in that allows your browser to run C/C++ applications directly on your x86 processor.

This post is for anyone who has found themselves in the situation where they have an existing Flash component that they can't embed in their Flash/Flex application, although they still want/need to use them together.

Lots of news today, First JavaFX, now Google. Google Earth, and the Google Earth browser API are now supported on Macs.

Great news! Google announced today at MAX that the Google Maps API for Flash now supports AIR.

Search engine optimization has always been a thorn into Flash’s side. But on July 1st Adobe issued a press release stating that they had developed, in collaboration with Google and Yahoo!, a new Flash player intended to help search engines...

Google chose to launch its Chrome browser with a comic book about the browser, among other things. In this entry I talk about the book itself, its value as a piece of information design, and a little about the book's author, renown comic book artist Scott McCloud.