Since the release of the MX 2004 suite, Macromedia has really turned up the marketing engine on the whole RIA (Rich Internet Application) thing. (See the latest at the Flash Platform page on Macromedia’s site). Beforehand, we could bring data into Flash but only in a fairly limited manner, mostly URL string variables. There were a few other technologies (does anyone remember Generator? Or even worse, Firefly?!), but it’s only been with the advent of Flash MX 2004 that data connectivity has really come into its own. (Want to get started? Go to the Macromedia Flash Data Integration site.)

So we can bring complex data structures into Flash now, but what do we do with it once we have it there? A lot of the examples you see around, put data into grids, populate drop-down lists, etc. Nice stuff! Definitely better than loading page after page of a regular website, but there’s room for more…a lot more. Let’s remember that Flash was a great graphics tool before it became a great application development tool! And it hasn’t left any of that ol’ graphic goodness behind!

There have been a couple of sites in the past year that I’ve really liked, both of which took data beyond tabular data and pie charts.

The first, unfortunately, no longer seems to be online, probably a victim of its own success. The Lance Armstrong Foundation started the whole rubber bracelet fad that has turned into a cultural phenomenon about a year ago. I’m a big cycling fan and I come from a family of cancer survivors as well as some who didn’t survive it, so I went right to the LiveStrong website when I first heard about the project and ordered up bracelets for my whole family. Now, the cool Flash bit of this story was a Flash-based form on the site where you could leave your name, hometown, relationship with cancer (survivor, family of a survivor, fighting cancer, etc.), and a jersey color…”Jersey color?! Now what will this all be about?” I wondered. After submitting, you were greeted with a cartoon-ish graphic of a road with a single cyclist shown from an aerial view. When you passed your cursor over this figure, a pop-up bubble (much like a tool-tip) told you that this was Lance, from Austin, TX, a cancer survivor. So far, so good, but nothing really spectacular. However, when you moved your mouse to one side, the Lance figure started moving across the screen, followed by a larger group of cyclist icons. As you began to mouse over these figures, each one had a name, a location, a relationship with cancer, and an individual jeresy color(!). Moving to the end of the line, you even found yourself, newly joined this peloton (that’s cyclist-speak for a group of bicycle riders). The emotional impact of seeing the sheer number of little cycling dudes, each personalized with a name and an implied story behind them, went far beyond what any graph or chart could have done. There was even a filtering system where you could turn off all but, say, folks currently fighting cancer, or cancer survivors. So the dataset grew (I don’t know how many people ended up signing up, but I checked in over the month or so following and it got to the point where you could spend quite a bit of time exploring this virtual peloton!) and Flash handled the dynamic generation of graphics in a really elegant way.

The second site is a more recent one. It’s the NYC2012: City of Dreams site in support of New York City’s bid for the 2012 Olympics Games. Since you can go look at it for yourself, I won’t spend that much time describing it. This site is like the LiveStrong site in that folks are leaving info about themselves as well as comments in support of NYC’s bid. That’s the data. The display takes its cues from the skyline of the city, creating blocks of skyscrapers filled with the information left by those visitors. I really like this one because of the 3D effects that are implied by the movement as well as the layering of colors.

What both of these sites do is take data and display it in an aesthetic manner, all in service of the bottom line message. This isn’t Flash for Flash sake (we’ve all seen those sites…maybe even created a couple of them), this Flash for the sake of communication. So all that data integration stuff doesn’t always have to be about numbers in a grid, we can really take it and run with it, using the animation tools in Flash to create powerful messages for our site visitors, messages that are updated dynamically and rely on the very latest information.

Do you have a favorite data-driven Flash site? Leave a comment with the URL!