Data Posters

Nathan over at flowingdata is now selling posters. They’re cool. And you should give him money just for maintaining his excellent blog.

If you like data posters, history shots is cool too.

September 30, 2009 | Filed Under Design, Other sites, Visualization | Leave a Comment 

Hans Rosling Video

He’s the man. There are lots of fancy data visualizations on the web, but, his are the best. Simple, powerful, important messages conveyed through charts. Here’s his presentation to the state department. Oh yeah – he’s also really funny and can swallow swords.

September 12, 2009 | Filed Under Visualization | Leave a Comment 

Flex SDK 3.4 Extracting DataVisualization Source

Adobe released a new sdk for Flex which fixes a cross-scripting security threat. So, you download the sdk, unzip it, create a new directory for 3.4.0 in your flex sdks directory. Also extract the data viz zip and put its files in the appropriate directories in the 3.4.0 directory that you just added. (You could do this different ways as well.)

Then in Flex Builder, right click on a project, choose Properties, Flex Compiler, Configure Flex SDKs. And add your new SDK.

So, pretty sure there are plenty of posts on how to do the above. But, now you need to extract the DataViz source. This post explains that. And here’s what you can copy and paste into Terminal to get it to work if you’re on a mac.

java -jar “/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/3.4.0/lib/DMV-source.jar” “/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flex” “/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/3.4.0″

The blog changes the straight quotes to curly quotes, so, you’ll probably have to change that.

September 11, 2009 | Filed Under Code, Data, Flex, Flex Charting, Visualization, charting | 2 Comments 

Flash Builder 4 DataVisualization Update

Just saw this post from Matt Chotin. Looks like no big changes to the Flex Charts, which is a bummer. However, I also came across this post (easy axis inversion in 4), which leads me to believe some changes have been made. I’d love to see a complete list of improvements, but, can’t seem to find anything. I will buy you a beer at the next beerfug, if you know of such a list. (I also promise to finally get the beerfug blog up and running before the next meeting. Blink tags are only funny for maybe 2 months.)

[UPDATE]
Here are some more links w/ info on charts.
Render Direction property on Pie Charts
More on the reversing axis direction.
Info on new filter functions for chart items.

Thanks to Sangavi for the links.

September 9, 2009 | Filed Under Flash, Flex, Flex Charting, Visualization, charting | Leave a Comment