I’ve had the chance to try an Adobe AIR application, called Google Analytics Reporting Suite.
As you may already know, Adobe AIR is a technology that gives developers the opportunity to develop Rich Web applications that can run in a native mode on a computer, as if the app was developed as a standard desktop application. At this time it runs on Windows and Macs, Linux will follow in the next months.
The setup of this app is quite simple, all you need is the AIR runtime that you can download on the Adobe website. After you download the Analytics Reporting Suite package and you install it, you’ll find the icon in the application folder, and the program will act as if it was a standard Cocoa app (on Mac OS X).
Once started, you’ll have to insert the Google Analytics login and password, so that the Google Analytics Reporting Suite will be able to retrieve your data from the server:
After that you can choose the website profile you want to analyze (if you have more than one website analyzed by Google) and then you’ll be able to access all the information you can find on the Analytics web site, but the overall experience will be ways better than using the old way.
Here’s an example of the visitor map made using a Google Maps mashup:
The application interface is fluid, you can magnify the interface as you please and you’ll notice that the information on the page gets reorganized so that it can take advantage of the space available: even the graphs are expanded!
If you think about the fact that the app gets the data via the Internet, the speed of the interface is astounding! It’s ways better than the original Google Analytics, IMHO.
So, the first contact with Google Analytics Reporting Suite, and with an AIR application, is great! Consider that - being Web 2.0 
- the software is in beta version.
Thanks Nicolas for this great application!
What do you think about this app? Did you try it?
Did you find other interesting and useful AIR applications? Let me know about them!
