Forest and the Trees » Flex Charting

PatientsLikeMe (where I work)

Doug — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:32:17 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while. But, looks like infosthetics beat me to it. I’ve been working at PatientsLikeMe for about a year – first consulting and now full time. PatientsLikeMe is a social media site for people w/ serious diseases. There are currently eight main disease communities: ALS, Epilepsy, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue System, HIV/AIDS, Mood Conditions (Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, OCD, PTSD), MS, Parkinson’s, and Organ Transplants. I’m making charts. It’s awesome. I really believe we’re making a difference in people’s lives and contributing to medical discovery. Please take a look at the very nice infosthetics post about us to learn more. I’ll try to start posting more about what we’re doing soon.

Intro to Flex Charting Talk – Weds Oct 28

Doug — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:11:40 +0000

I’ll be giving a talk on Flex Charting next week at NEIA. Please attend.

Here’s the description…

Intro to Flex Charting

Flex Charting is a pain in the ass to use. It’s very easy to create a simple chart but gets more and more difficult the more you want to customize. During this talk, we will start with a simple chart and add more and more features and functionality. By the end you should have a basic understanding of the Flex charting classes. Time permitting, we will discuss some other Flex data visualization libraries and some tips and tricks for making complex charts. Our sample data set will be Michael Jackson’s Number 1 hits, so if nothing else, you will learn something about the King of Pop.

Wednesday, October 28
7:15 – 9:00
Room 1001-1002 on Center Campus The New England Institute of Art 10 Brookline Place West Brookline, MA 02445 Brookline Village Stop on the MBTA D Greenline

Flex SDK 3.4 Extracting DataVisualization Source

Doug — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:21:26 +0000

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.

Flash Builder 4 DataVisualization Update

Doug — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:53:01 +0000

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.

Rotating Text without Embedding Fonts

Doug — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:47:14 +0000

I needed this for creating an axis label for a chart. The Flex Charting label was flashing. Basically it creates a bitmap of the text and then rotates that. Obviously, you can’t select text, but, might be useful for someone. Here it is. Click the “add a text field” button. Then change text in the text input component. Rotate using the slider. Right click, view source.

Info/Data Design Link Dump

Doug — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:18:31 +0000

Bill Scott’s presentation on designing web interfaces is great. I’ll be buying his book. (via DashboardSpy)

I just ran across datavisualization.ch. Add it to your must reads (along w/ infosthetics and flowing data. And so many more.)

Spent some time going through this flickr set.

And watched this video of Manuel Lima from Visual Complexity.

Also, there’s a Flex Data Visualization contest.

Holy shit. It appears people actually (finally, thank god) care about data visualization. For the first time, I don’t think you can keep track of all the examples (and still have time for work). I remember when Public APIs hit that point maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Exciting.

Source Files from Mashup Talk

Doug — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:57:19 +0000

Here’s a link to a pdf of the mashup talk I just gave to the Harvard Flash User Group.

A special thank you to Oscar Cortes. I shamelessly stole content from the mashup talk he gave to both the Design Patterns group and the excellent Flex Camp Boston.

Speaking at Harvard Flash Group Thursday

Doug — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:00:17 +0000

I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Flash Group this Thursday. It’s open to the public (kind of), you need to be let in by Nick. So, if you have any interest in going, send me an email. You’d just have to meet at Lamont Library before the talk. I’ll talk about using Flex for creating mashups and the wonder that is Web 2.0. I’ll also walk through some code I will have written by the time of the talk.Harvard University Flash User Group March 19, 2009, 12:15 – 1:45 Lamont Library
Web 2.0 and Mashups w/ Flex

ADG Color Rows by Depth

Doug — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:53:19 +0000

Really need to start blogging again. Here’s an example using HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor to set the row color of an Advanced DataGrid by depth. Right-click to view source.

Data Grid and ADG Footers

Doug — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:54:43 +0000

[UPDATE 26 Jun 2008] – view source is now fully functional

I made some enhancements to the DataGrid footer posted in Alex’s Flex Closet. This supports resizing columns, locked columns, and horizontal scrolling. It is also implemented in both the Data Grid and the Advanced Data Grid. Licensed under MIT (which I believe is the do whatever the hell you want license – commercial, non-commercial, sell it unedited to someone (although that would be morally wrong)).

I haven’t tested these very much. If you find a bug, please comment.

Demo here. The functions that calculate the content of the footers are in the main mxml. Right click to view source.