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Twitter, Flash & HTML5
Twitter is great. It keeps me up-to-date on what is happening in the world and nowadays I get my information directly from the source! The added value of those traditional, old-school newspaper/TV journalists is decreasing day by day. This is a good thing. I see most journalists as nothing more than a filter, tweaking their opinions into the real facts. With Twitter the people that I see as important or interesting are the modern journalists. They are my personal groups of journalists. And if they don’t deliver quality, I just unfollow them.
Tonight I read two nice tweets. First I learned that someone wrote an app/hack to use flash on the iPhone/iPad (iOS). If this thing really works this would be great news for dashboard development with Xcelsius SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition. Finally the development of dashboards for the iPhone and iPad could begin. Let’s hope so. Here is the article with the video ‘proof’.
Next I read a tweet about the differences between Adobe Flash and HTML5. Apple favours HTML5 and gives a nice showcase on its website (Safari 5 required). But what exactly is HTML5 and how can Flash and HTML5 be compared? Focus published this cool A4-sized overview.
Thanks for tweeting!
Prototype: SAP BO Exploration Dashboards
I found this video by the SAP Innovation Center, showing us a prototype of some cool new tooling for quick and easy dashboard creation. It looks a bit like the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. Enjoy!
Bye bye Xcelsius, Hello SAP Crystal Solutions?
Last week SAP introduced a new product name for its reporting and dashboarding tooling portfolio: SAP Crystal Solutions. Unfortunately the Xcelsius brand name will completely disappear. Xcelsius Present will be SAP Crystal Presentation Design and Xcelsius Engage should be called SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition from now on.
Uh right. Why didn’t they just name it SAP Crystal Xcelsius?
In the table below an overview of the old and new names is shown:
Old Name |
New Name |
| Crystal Reports | SAP Crystal Reports |
| Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 | SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 |
| Crystal Reports for Eclipse | SAP Crystal Reports for Eclipse |
| Crystal Reports Viewer | SAP Crystal Reports viewer |
| Crystal Reports Server | SAP Crystal Reports Server |
| Crystal Reports Visual Advantage | SAP Crystal Reports Dashboard Design package |
| Crystal Reports Developer Advantage | SAP Crystal Reports runtime server license |
| Xcelsius Present | SAP Crystal Presentation Design |
| Xcelsius Engage | SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, personal edition |
Get more information from this blog.
Xcelsius: Using the Push Button for data input
Xcelsius is a great tool to build interactive what-if scenarios based on MS Excel models. We recently got a request to build such a dashboard and one of the user interface requirements was that the user should be able to change a value by clicking something like a +/- button. Clicking the plus had to increase the value with 1, and clicking the min had to decrease it with 1.
Luckily, Xcelsius provides us the Spinner component. This would have been a good and easy solution, if another 
requirement wouldn’t have been that the dashboard had to be used on a (multi)touch screen. Touch means big buttons for user input and as you can see on the right, the Spinner component is way too detailed. So we needed something else to do the job.
To solve this we used the new Push Button components. The Push Button simply does what its name says and pushes a value from a source cell to a destination cell. To solve our little problem we used two of these Push Buttons and some basic MS Excel logic.
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SAP StreamWork (12Sprints) videos
SAP recently published a bunch of videos (promo’s, introductions, tutorials) on its collaboration platform SAP StreamWork, formerly known as 12Sprints. You can find them in the SAP Streamwork YouTube channel.
Below I put the cool promo video and a proof-of-concept video of SAP Streamwork integration with a SAP BPM purchase order process.
