First things first, what is Adobe AIR? Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a runtime environment for building Internet applications (using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and Ajax) that can be installed as desktop programs. We won't get into much details, except from the users' point of view. In order to be able to open and use Adobe AIR applications (that have an .air extension) you need to install a free AIR runtime from Adobe, using this link: Get Adobe AIR. It's just like when you needed to install a Flash plugin for your browser to be able to see Flash animations.
Once Adobe AIR is installed, you can download the Google Analytics AIR Reporting Suite from Nicolas' website: Google Analytics beta 3.air
Once downloaded double-click on it and you'll see Adobe AIR already prompting and guiding you through the installation. First you'll need to acknowledge that this is an unsigned application so click on Install if you want to continue:
Next set up the location where this will be installed and choose to add or not a shortcut and start it after installation:
To my surprise the overall installation process took very little. After it's installed you'll see already the interface of Google Analytics Reporting Suite, prompting you to add a profile (your Google Analytics information). Once the profiled is added and loaded you can see already your dashboard, only this time is not via the browser but via this Adobe AIR application. Basically you have pretty much the same information that Google Analytics offers, except that is organized a little bit different.
The advantage of using this over the regular Google Analytics is that you're doing it from your desktop, not going through your browser and logging in. Plus, as you click on different reports from your dashboard those will open as separate tabs so you can access them quite easy (a feature that would be nice if Google would implement). Creating reports as PDF, XML or CSV is possible with it too, furthermore these are opened in the same window (different tab though) of the Google Analytics Reporting Suite application.
This application is free for now, but I've seen they intend to add some paid editions too (with extra features I assume). If you're like me and prefer to have access to information like this without opening your browser, I suggest you give it a go.
