sparklines

‘Sparklines‘ are small graphical charts that can be inserted in line with the text. My curiosity was sparked into it when Rajesh ask me to look into for data representation in Mobiles! A discussion forum on sparklines from ‘Edward Tufte‘ ’s website was a great starting point. Edward Tufte is well know for his contributions in the field of visual literacy and information design. Look into the comments section of the post for more implementation and insights. A example is following

Another  neat implementation of the sorting algorithm visually is the following picture.

The use of sparklines in financial stuff is pretty evident easily. It their inherent ability (when used properly) to pack huge amount of dense data. Following is a excerpt from the book – Beautiful Evidence where there is a chapter on Sparklines.

More exploration in the comments section leads to  a beautiful implementationby Mariano

We can easily see how we can see the trends and patterns of the yahoo stock so easily … I just cannot imagine getting so much of information in far lesser a place. Imagine the use of such visualization where space is a crunch! Lovely smart use of color, font,size and shading!
Also do check out the wiki dedicated to sparklines http://sparkline.org/ and if you want to quickly play with sparklines checkout the script at http://intepid.com/stuff/sparklines/

See the stocks ticker at the bottom of this webpage … its pretty cool. Infosthetics talks about how cleverly they use sparklines to display their statistics.

Use see the use of sparklines in google finance. They have put it to great use – in general I am awed with their display flash app ! The php script and the excel plugin are also pretty cool – I tried them out and was impressed what I could build upon in a day on the open source i.e just tweaking it to my requirements. Hope this post is pricked your interest in one of the several clever ways to show data. the excel bar graphs and pie charts are not the only ones! making them inline is cooler!

back in action …

Had taken a break from the internet (for personal use) via a computer. Was using however through a mobile! Just had too much to work and needed a break and was catching up on good amount of reading. Finished 3 books   Free Culture, Tipping Point and Blink (yeah! do I hear some claps??) and almost more than half way on the fourth Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity …

Have some news from the website I am addicted to and believe it or not paying to be addicted I used to spend 70% of my online time a year back there and now with difficulty trying my best not to exceed 10% … ha ha

1. Flickr and Nokia are joining hands … woot! Flickr news blog says:

16th Aug: We’ve joined forces with Nokia to help you upload high-res photos direct to Flickr from your Nokia Nseries device! The new Nokia N93, N73 and N72 devices come Flickr goodness baked in so you can easily upload directly from your device without having to download and install any additional applications. There’s more info at flickr.com/nokia and you can find out more about the Nseries devices at nokia.com.

2. Taglines: This is old but thought will mention it as I am talking about Flickr. This is a kickass flash implementation that involves a combination of tags, tag clouds and timeline motion! To see it in action head over to http://research.yahoo.com/taglines/

Now that Flickr has joined with Nokia – I am very darn sure that a video version if going to come out common guys I know rumours were going around in Tagcamp a year back! Its hightime with youtube almost there as the best … better release the feature out fast!!

laws of innovation

Doors of perception has these following cool laws of innovation – the law of the new rising

1: Don’t think “new product” – think social value.
2: Think social value before “tech”.
3: Enable human agency. Design people into situations, not out of them.
4: Use, not own. Possession is old paradigm.
5: Think P2P, not point-to-mass.
6: Don’t think faster, think closer.
7: Don’t start from zero. Re-mix what’s already out there.
8: Connect the big and the small.
9: Think whole systems (and new business models, too).
10: Think open systems, not closed ones.