In case you weren’t aware, a lot of the stuff you can do in a website you can also do in the Flash Player. Prime example: Google Analytics tracking.
Now for a simple Flash movie, you’d traditionally host the Flash file in an external website, and add the tracking to the HTML pages. If you’re doing something a little more different – or are obsessive about knowing how your users are interacting with the content – you might be interested to know that there is support for actionscript-initiated tracking, and that it’s supported by Google themselves (a good sign).
You can read all about the Google Analytics tracking component for Flash on the Google code website: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/flashTrackingIntro.html
Where this really comes into its own is in AIR applications. Flash / Flex tracking in a HTML website isn’t really all that special – once you know the API a little, you can always use the ExternalInterface commands in the Flash Player to communicate with javascript functions on the host page, but that kind of option isn’t usually available to a pure Flash-based AIR application. Using the component effectively removes the need for the external javascript file, and means that your desktop AIR application can communicate freely with Google Analytics – enabling application tracking. The code is no different whether its an online Flash webpage, or a desktop AIR application.
