Alain Hufkens {Rich Interactive Applications Developer}

Tracking AIR applications with pubblegum

I don't have a lot of experience yet with tracking AIR applications developed with Flash or Flex. Adhese has a service called pubblegum that can be used directly from Flash without calling an external Javascript (which is the case with Google Analytics). So we decided to give it a try.

What exactly is pubblegum?

Whether it is Adobe® Flash®, Adobe® Air®, Microsoft® Silverlight®, Javascript or something as basic as an image. Pubblegum tracks your content in real-time from within the file and reports all available info, from custom interactions to URLs where your content was published.

Cool is that they have a specific API for AIR applications built in Actionscript 3 and the API also takes care of the fact that your application can be disconnected. If you want to use it, you can send them a mail to get a free trial. In our case we used the specific API for tracking user actions in the AIR application. And it is fairly easy to use. You only need to include the com.adhese.pubblegum.PubblegumAir class in your source code (a .swc file for Flex projects would also be nice guys) and write these two lines of code:

The first variable is provided by Adhese and should be your company name/identifier, the second and third parameter can be chosen freely. The last parameter specifies whether you are tracking an application. So true tells the API, that the client is an application.

That isn't all that bad is it, and on top of that you get a nice dashboard where you can analyze your results.