Well it’s all over now, the results are in and I’d feel a little out of my depth to comment on the direction of politics in the UK and our share of EU seats, so this is just a quick post to point out the rather well presented BBC web apps used to illustrate the results.
They are mostly compliled into flash swf format, and I would assume the user interface was developed with an RIA platform. It’s hard to tell specifically how it operates, but it seems most parts of it were designed to automatically update when new results were added (presumably to some kind of back-end database), in the case of the ‘council results map’ it shows that the web app is updating itself every so many seconds as the results come in.
It’s a nice feature, the sort of system you might see employed to more practical use in a line of business where certain information needs to be monitored live in real-time and represented in some useful graphical manner that can be interacted with. It might not be immediately obvious how useful this could be, but it’s worth considering that such systems save people time and can give accurate information over an accessible and flexible medium (and by that I mean the web) and therefore it really could save money.
I almost forgot, here’s the link to the page with them all on (if you’re interested you can search the page for the .swf link to download the flash sections):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/flash/html/eu.stm
