I've got something of a soft spot for dashboards. That's why I was pleasantly surprised recently to discover Happy Metrix. Happy Metrix, currently in beta, is an Adobe AIR based desktop application that lets you build dashboard reports for a variety of different datasources. As an example, you can integrate with Google Analytics, Twitter, and YouTube to see how your content is performing. Here's my main dashboard (click for a larger size picture):
And here is a panel I built just for my web sites. I like that I can quickly scan the percentage values to see if I'm growing or losing traffic.
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The only thing missing now are custom remote data sources. You can add custom widgets, but the data has to be hard coded. That would be fine for a presentation (or for a machine at a conference), but not for any real usage now. Happy Metrix is currently free (no idea if it will cost money) so definitely check it out.
I don't like to add stuff to a blog post after I've published, but I just found something cool and as I released this entry less than five minutes ago, I figure no one has had a chance to read it yet. There is an "Export" feature that I assumed was for settings. Actually it lets you export the charts in PDF or JPG format. Cool! For the heck of it I included a PDF of my dashboard if you want to see an example. Just download below.