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The Absolute Coolest, Sexiest Flex Application. Ever.

Sun, 2007-02-18 10:26 — mikepotter
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The Amgen Tour of California, one of the top 4 bike races in the world (so I'm told), got underway Sunday with the coolest, sexiest Flex application ever built. The application was built by Adobe in just over 4 weeks (yes, you read that right), and showcases the power of the Flex framework, Flash Media Server and Flex Data Services.

Tour Tracker 2.0 uses GPS on the bike riders to track their position in real time, streaming the data down to the Flex application using Flex Data Services. The bikers positions are displayed over top of a map, with a number of different views into the current bike stage. Information directly from the bikers, into space, then back down to a cluster of servers, sent to clients in real time and displayed over top of a map showing the actual position of the riders at any time. How do I explain that to my grandma who still can't understand a CD?

You need to experience this application to believe it.

Photographers along the course are equiped with camera integrated with GPS technology. The photos they take are geoencoded with GPS information, uploaded and then streamed down to the application, overlayed onto the map. Imagine watching the race in Tour Tracker, seeing the riders go by, and a few minutes later seeing photos pop up on the same map behind where the racers were.

This application is made possible because of Flex and the JIT compiler in Flash Player 9. JavaScript would have a very hard time handling all the calculations and information streaming into this application.

Full screen video is provided via Flash Media Server. The video is integrated directly into the application, providing a seamless user experience unlike anything else available. I haven't seen live video, but the race today at 1 PM PT should include it.

Microsoft had it right. The wow does indeed start now, they just had the wrong platform.

Tour Tracker 2.0 is the best example I've seen of what's possible in a rich Internet applications. The fact that the entire application was built in 4 weeks is a testament to the tools used.

Best of all, those tools are available for free. The Flex SDK is available free of charge for anyone to use, Flex Data Services is available in a free Express version, and Flash Media Server is available for free for use in production servers with less than 10 concurrent connections.

The official press release from the Tour provides more information about what the application includes.

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Mon, 2007-02-19 11:51 — Tink (not verified)

Not very sexy for me :(

First time i clicked the link i got a blank screen.

Hit back and clicked it again and the Flex app loaded, but it didn't load any data. I click on 'peloton' bottomg right and i got an error and the whole app stopped working :(

Clicked back and tried again, got a white screen., clicked back and tried again, got a white screen.

Clicked back and tried again and it loaded again. This time it actually loaded some data as well, bu once the data loaded the image was just of the sea (i presume it aint a cycle race through the sea?). Also it showed some text at the bottom, i.e. how man KM, but all this text was overllapping each other (i.e. there was labels sitting under labels), and i expceted some sort of graph data to show, but nothing happened. click anywhere did nothing??

Tried again and all i get is a black page now? Looks cool in the pics though.

Mon, 2007-02-19 13:29 — pooya (not verified)

Search engines

Hey, I met you at your talk in SFU. This tour tracker sure looks nice. Yahoo maps are easier to use for commercial applications, is that right? I remember Google maps' commercial license was very expensive.
Btw, can search engines index flex apps easily? I remember Google once started indexing swf files but I can't really recall searching for something and getting a flash page in results.

Mon, 2007-02-19 16:24 — German Bauer (not verified)

Before bashing on Microsoft...

"... Please bear with us while we are experiencing technical difficulties ..." pretty much the whole day today. Maybe before you go in hyperbole and bash on your competitors one would like to see it working at all. How can developers be convinced to switch if that is what Flash based RIAs look like and if the basics don't work below that glossy surface?

Sun, 2007-02-25 23:35 — AP (not verified)

I chatted with the race

I chatted with the race organizer (I'm a bike nut and geek) to clarify what did and didn't work here. The technical difficulties were ALL outages with data providers, not with the application itself. This included, at various times, the video stream provider having network downtime, the GPS data provider having trouble getting to its satelites, and the webserver cluster from which the application and the stage data were served being overloaded with the number of requests. Now, an "application" does indeed include everthing that makes it work. But, the application itself, while lacking in robustness in the face of zero data, really was much more than gloss. If you watched the race on Tuesday, Wednesday or Saturday (I did) for example, all of the servers were up the whole race, and I got to see live video, had a map tracking the riders minute by minute (and showing the break away in real time) and got commentary and real time photo updates while watching!

Tue, 2007-02-20 12:57 — Anonymous (not verified)

looks like 4 weeks

Ho hum. It looks a few cool things are in there--too bad you only had 4 weeks because the interface is less than ideal and you have a bunch of "big whoop" features... like resizing the images down to 1x1 pixel.

For the record, picnik and yahoo maps are arguably better Flex apps. And... if you really like this one, maybe you should call it "the best so far".

Wed, 2007-02-21 10:22 — tradingbrowsers (not verified)

Hmmmm

The idea is the best part of this site - after that, it falls apart. I'm betting it worked great on PCs loaded with memory and fast video AND on the local network - probably worked great! But, put this on the Net and it's abysmal, unfortunately. Way too heavy and way too slow. Nearly crashed Firefox (Mac). Not the coolest, not the sexiest - no way. It just seems there's this effort from Macromedia first and now Adobe. Macromedia tried so hard to make their new Website (years ago) entirely Flash - everything. Remember the beta period? It was awful - just didn't work - was like "why bother - this just isn't going to work". Now Adobe seems to be trying yet again with Flex. It's good for "parts" but for gosh sake, not the entire thing! This particular site would be the Coolest if: 1. re-written with more code, less flash. 2. new interface that makes sense (still trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do). Nice attempt but definitely no where near ready for prime time. I'm going to have to dig up a project we did internally here for one of my boat trips. It's pretty sweet and does the exact same thing this site is supposed to be doing but much faster and much more intuitively. It basically tracks my boat trip around the great lakes last summer and uses Google Maps. Unfortunately, no Flash - but it was really sweet.

Wed, 2007-02-21 10:34 — mikepotter
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The site works fine for me

The site works fine for me in Firefox on the Mac. Same in Safari. Mac is a Macbook Pro.

"This particular site would be the Coolest if: 1. re-written with more code, less flash."
I don't know what you mean. The site is written entirely in code - ActionScript 3. That's what Flex is - a framework for building applications in ActionScript 3.

Please let me know about the application you built, sounds neat.

I actually prefer Yahoo Maps to Google Maps, but that might be just me.

Mike

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