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.
Enough of background, now on to Adobe AIR application named StockQ. Here’s the feature set for StockQ:
- * Streaming stock quotes
- * No brokerage account login/authentication
- * Streaming indices in header
- * Ability to configure refresh rate (1sec – 5mins)
- * Manage multiple portfolios
- * Portfolios stored in local SQLite database
- * Sorting/shifting of columns in data grid
- * Cool custom skin
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 and used Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
StockQ Installation Steps:
Please email feedback to bhira at hotmail dot com and let me know if there is something you like about the app or something you’d like to change or add.
-- Baldeep Hira
