Having lived through quite a few earthquakes, I can’t imagine what the people of Japan are feeling with so many large earthquakes. I have been monitoring the earthquakes all day using our GMaps Plugin earthquake tracker. As you can see, the earthquakes are located right along a major fault line. One of our own at Centigon Solutions has family in Japan who are doing o.k, so we hope that others were able to connect and ensure the safety of friends and family.
Today I read a great blog post from Pieter Hendrikx about a tool that Adobe released that converts Flash files (FLA) to HTML5 / SVG.
This is a great post where he shares one of the interesting Labs utilities that Adobe released, indicating their understanding of how important porting Flash content to HTML5 is to developers. From my testing, this seems to be a utility for converting simple banner ads and not full blown applications.
Pieter highlights a very important, and distinct limitation for porting any Flash application to HTML5 and Javascript. There is nothing that I know of today that can effectively port action script to javascript. Today, such an effort requires a ground up re-design, though layout and graphical assets are obviously re-usable as more tools come online.
I think we all agree that Xcelsius output to iOS today is a great idea in concept. Given that software in general is increasingly fragmented across platforms and devices, I personally think SAP should focus on getting Xcelsius up to snuff with competing products on the desktop before going mobile. 100% of the customer base who is using Xcelsius, does so on the desktop today. In 9 months, a percentage of them who adopt RIM or Android devices over iPads should be moderately satisfied with what they have. For example, I know that Antivia is working on a great solution for porting dashboards to Flash enabled devices.
My question to you? Does SAP need to completely change a highly successful dashboard design platform to serve one single device even it is not the best possible approach to dashboards oniOS? That is a good question for the community to weigh in.
My personal opinion is that I don’t like the idea of having technology ported to my mobile device when I know it was designed before the first iPhone hit the market. That is not to say that it could not be successfully re-purposed for mobile, but it would need a highly talented and focused team to do so. With so many vendors focused on building native applications for iPad specifically designed for mobile, Xcelsius would be a dinosaur from day one even if we could port SAP Dashboard Design 2011 to the iPad with HTML5. Roambi has set the high standard for usability and native integration, so I use it as my benchmark for anything else in the marketplace. Imagine where we will be in 18 months… could you see Xcelsius still thriving on iPad given its current abilities?
This is a tough problem for SAP to address. What are your thoughts?
As someone who pays careful attention to design, I have long complained about some of the in-flexibilities of using Google Maps as a visualization tool for dashboards. One of the main points of contention from designers is the visual interference caused by Google Maps at various zoom levels. For example, highways and various feature definitions (man made vs natural) are not important for consuming quantitative information within a map. While these attributes are important for consumer purposes or specific business apps, they may not impact business analysis.
I made custom map styling a top priority for the next version of GMaps Plugin V3 which is coming in the beginning of February. With my 15 Days of GMaps Plugin blog series, I chose the GMaps Plugin 3.0 map style designer as the first exciting new feature to share. Now we can simplify our map designs to only include the most important map features for the task at hand.
Some of the cool designs I have come up with look nothing like Google Maps. Hopefully those of you who take advantage of GMaps Plugin will find this just as important.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW DETAILS ABOUT GMAPS PLUGIN NEW STYLE DESIGNER
Starting next Monday, you can see what my team at Centigon Solutions has been working on for the last several months; GMaps Plugin 3.0. Since I use Xcelsius on a daily basis and constantly interact with the gurus community, relaying your needs into powerful map design features has been a driving force for us to innovate. With 2 years of development, thousands of downloads, and a lot of great feedback, we now have something substantial that I am very proud of. There is lots to share, so you can check it out on the new Centigon Solutions Official Blog starting 1.1.2011.
If you happen to check out my 15 Days of GMaps Plugin series next week I would love to hear any feedback or ideas. For those of you who are twitter users, make sure you can put your name in the hat to win a free Samsung Galaxy Tablet.
For those of you who subscribe and read this blog, “Interactive Data Visualization by Ryan Goodman” I am excited to continue writing for the 5th year now. I dedicate a percentage of my time to contribute my personal experiences, ideas, projects, and thoughts. For those of you whom I have had the pleasure to meet at conferences or virtually, I do truly enjoy writing and reading about your experiences (good and bad) since we are all in this space together working toward the same goals. I welcome any ideas or topics that you would like me to cover.
Moving forward, I will continue to support and recommend Xcelsius (Now SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards or SAP Crystal Dashboard Design) as long as SAP remains committed to evolving and enhancing the technology. Because I work with and employ a team of talented developers, I have focused more time covering the SDK in the past year and will continue to do so in 2011. With a new version of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards on its way, there will be a new wave of workarounds, features, frustrations, and new findings to share.
In addition to this blog you can find my writings on:
Centigon Solutions Official Blog (NEW)
EverythingXcelsius.com
DashboardInsight.com
Thank you for your continued readership and support!
-Ryan Goodman
One of the technologies that I discovered earlier this year is Google Charts. The API is brilliant allowing web developers to have a free charting framework at their disposal without a lot of work.
I used Google Charts in an older GMaps Plugin sales demo where I nested Google Charts inside of a map Info Window. I started down the path developing a simple Xcelsius model for generating the URL syntax. I stopped this process when I showed this to my development team who advised that this goes against all of the work we have done to lock down GMaps Plugin to meet the strictest security standards.
While we have made a conscious decision not to formally promote Google Charts for use with GMaps Plugin, I wanted to share the work I did through my blog. I advise that you review the Google Charts API docs and investigate if your corporate security policies will allow you to use this technologies. If so, you can couple this with GMaps Plugin or any other HTML compliant framework.
This example provides a working example of the Google map, a URL that you can plug and play into the Google Map label, or just the chart URL by itself. I also provided the source files for the tool itself in case if you are interested in learning how I put this together.
I have a very important tip for developers using any connectivity for Xcelsius.
DO NOT use the “Disable mouse input on Load” property. I have been using Xcelsius for 7 years and it has always come back to bite me in projects where needless hours were wasted troubleshooting. It bit me once again prompting this post and I hope to save everyone the same trouble by ingraining into your development knowledge to avoid this property.
What does this property do: Disable mouse input on Load iswill prohibit you end user from clicking on components while data is loading. One thing we have found working with lots of add-on components is that this feature and the SDK do not play nice together. I have also found scenarios even without add-ons the following symptoms:
1. After clicking inside of a dashboard and triggering live office, nothing in the dashboard is selectable.
2. Queries will seem to hang indefinitely, not returning data.
If you experience either of these problems, check to make sure this property is not enabled.
I would say report it as a bug to BOBJ which is a good idea, but for now, I live without this feature.
In 2007, I wrote an article outlining how to reset a dashboard using a selector: View original article. Since then, there have been some changes to Xcelsius where I wanted to re-visit this workaround.
Xcelsius does have a reset button built into the product, but it presents some challenges:
Instead of using reset, you have a few options at your disposal, that essentially do the same thing. Upon clicking “reset” the selectors will clear out your selections.
This re-set feature does present a few challenges, specifically when it comes to features like chart drill down. This is still going to be a challenge because there is not a bindable “selected item” property on the behavior tab.
In this week’s Reportapalooza challenge, I saw a cool feature in Mico’s Ronald McDonald House dashboard.
On the bottom of her dashboard, Mico hooked up a twitter feed to a Ticker component, which is an awesome use case for this component. I found the RSS link on my Twitter page to transform my Twitter page into an RSS feed and was up and running in minutes. Here is how you can do the same for your Xcelsius marketing and demo dashboards.
Download Source Files | View GMaps Plugin Twitter Feed
Make sure you vote for your favorite Reportapalooza dashboard!
In a post BusinessObjects hosted user conference, this is by far the best one since SAP acquired BusinessObjects. I was fortunate to see many of my friends, colleagues, customers, and partners over the last few days and though three days is long enough for the conference, there never seemed to be enough time to meet with everyone…
Presentation
On my first day, I had a primetime speaking slot where I presented “Xcelsius + GMaps – Coding + 15min = Must See”. My formula title backfired as they mis-printed it in the agenda but the turnout was amazing. I demoed GMaps Plugin 2.1 for the first time and took the time to explain why maps are so important to business intelligence and justified how Google Maps is the right tool for the job. All of the feedback was very positive and I hope to give this presentation again shortly. If you want to see some of the demos and GMaps 2.1 functionality, I have a webinar scheduled this Wed. at 10:00 am PST. Click here for more details
Xcelsius Gurus Party Sponsored by SAP
The highlight of the conference for me was the party, which was a little over-crowded but extremely valuable for networking. More so than ever, I spoke with existing SAP customers who have started using BusinessObjects tools like Xcelsius. Learning some of the customer pains and needs was very insightful and I am very interested to hear from the newer Xcelsius developers who pick up the technology and start learning through the community.
ASUG
Over the weekend I was fortunate to meet some of the ASUG leadership and I must say that I now understand where this recent post, “How ASUG Won me Over , came from . These guys are passionate about engaging the BusinessObjects community and I think they are onto something. I look forward to working closer with ASUG and the events they hold into 2011.
My Problem
The biggest problem I had was making all of my colleagues and friend’s sessions though I did see some very cool stuff with the new BOBJ 4.0 release and other vendor solutions that I look forward to sharing here on my blog.
I look forward to next year’s conference where we will absolutely be a sponsor so I can plant myself in one place if anything to ensure I catch as many people as possible face to face.
