Flex Based Census Dashboard Mashup

Dave Nielsen of StrikeIron Web Services pinged me to let me know about Census Dashboard, a Flex Mashup created by Andrew Trice (of Cynergy Systems) using free StrikeIron APIs (for US zip code and census data lookup) and Yahoo maps. Very cool indeed.

8 Comments

Clint February 1, 2007

Cool stuff. What I could use is Internet statistics. Now that would be nice!!

Ben Forta February 1, 2007

Andrew, great, thanks for the clarification. --- Ben

Steve Moore February 1, 2007

I'm assuming this is using Flex 1.5 since from what I've seen of the Yahoo Maps interface it works with 1.5. I'm very interested in doing a Yahoo map mashup with a Flex 2 project I'm working on. Does anyone have any info on upcoming Yahoo release of a 2.0 compatible component?

Andrew Trice February 1, 2007

The mashup was created in Flex 2, using an embedded Flash 8 swf for the Yahoo maps. Communication between Flash 8 & Flash 9/Flex is done using a localConnection object. Hope that clears it up. Thanks for posting this Ben, I hope everyone enjoys it.

Ben Forta February 1, 2007

Steve, I know that it's something that they are looking at, but I have no details that I can share yet. --- Ben

Phillip Kerman February 2, 2007

Ah, just like all my jobs-- 2 hours. Seriously, nice little app! It'd be nice if the stats on the left would update when I pan or zoom the map. Also, the pie chart is not useful when there are many miniscule values--like one person of a certain race in a population of thousands. I'm also not clear the color coding in the pie--sometimes one race will show up in one color then the next time it's another color. But... overall, nice.

Andrew Trice February 2, 2007

Honestly, it didn't take more than a few hours. I worked on it one night 2 weeks ago, and have been polishing it here-and-there when I find the time. Overall, I'd say a maximum of 6-7 hours was put into that version. It is actually pretty easy once you are familiar with the Flex framework. The hardest part was getting Yahoo Maps incorporated and working properly using the localConnection object.

Mikkel Johansen February 2, 2007

It would be interesting to know how long time it took to develop the dashboard.

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