Stock4Q iPhone App is available now. It's the mobile version of Stock4Q webapp and has similar functionality for streaming stock quotes and portfolio management. The iPhone app makes REST API calls to www.stock4q.com server to login, retrieve, update portfolios and user profile using JSON. This way you can access the same portfolios on iPhone and in a web browser on any platform.

Stock4Q website is live now, providing streaming stock quotes and portfolio management. It provides live quotes in a browser using HTML5 and supports variable refresh rates. Stock4Q has single sign-on with Facebook, Google and Yahoo using OAuth 2.0 and allows you to import your Google portfolios into Stock4Q using Google Finance API. It tracks the gains/losses for each portfolio allowing you to set buy/sell triggers with traffic light highlighting. It has charts and stokes that visualize the trends for your portfolios over weeks, months and quarters.

This website renders fine on PC browsers, but navigation has some quirks for tablet and mobile devices. I'm testing this only on iPad and iPhone4 but the general navigation and control principles should apply to all. The first problem is the absence of mouseover events in iPad/iPhone, so I changed the navigation to initiate animated dropdown display with onclick event. Secondly, clicks are performed using a finger which has bigger surface area than mouse, increased the font size for tablets so solve this problem. The iPhone screen is much smaller so need to change font for body text and re-format text descriptions. Try accessing the site on iPad or iPhone and it will set the correct viewport and override the CSS with the same content and format.

HTML5 support is picking up in browsers, Safari and Chrome are definitely ahead of the pack with good support for CSS3 features like gradients, border-radius, transitions. Firefox4 is not bad either, just waiting for it to graduate from beta to production. I haven't played too much with IE9, one of the problems I have with IE9 is that it overwrites my existing IE8 installation. I decided to update this website to use CSS3 features and see how they work out in different browsers. I'm trying not to put any CSS hacks so this website will not render in its entirety on older browsers.

SfDash is an Adobe Flex 3.0 based application for creating, editing and viewing rich interactive dashboards for Salesforce.com data. It is a managed app and once deployed you can add "SfDash" tab to your personalized tabs. It supports interactive dashboards with drilldowns, intuitive wizard for dashboard item editing and highly customizable dashboard layout using drag and drop. This is version 1.0 of SfDash managed app.

Updated StockQ app to version 0.8. This version is compatible with Adobe AIR beta 3 runtime. Hopefully, this will be compatible with Adobe AIR 1.0 release as well. There is no change in feature set, only the packaging was changed to use the latest Adobe AIR SDK.

You might have heard the buzz surrounding Adobe AIR which allows developers to run HTML, AJAX and Flash applications from desktop. I've been using Adobe Flex for web applications with no desktop footprint and was interested in seeing how an online technology would perform in desktop environment. It was an opportunity for me to play with thick-client apps after almost 10 years, things have definitely changed in the last decade. It was fun using Adobe Flex Builder 3, the editor still has some distance to go to match Eclipse based Java Editor in code formatting/re-factoring support, but it performs well in design mode. I've been looking for a good software package that provides streaming stock quotes, of course the catch being it has to be free and have a slick UI. All brokerage websites have a browser or applet version that forces me to login to their website every time I want to check stock prices and when the session expires, the quotes go stale.

The feature set is light but the technology and app are quite cool. It uses local SQLite database bundled with Adobe AIR for user data persistence and UI is based on Flex controls and ActionScript. Flex DataGrid performs well and handles real-time stock updates seamlessly. Some of the icons used in the app were derived from work available at here using Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. StockQ is also available for download at Adobe AIR Marketplace.