Mr. .NET

In my purchasing of SimCity Societies I ran across a sparkline use that I had to blog about.  After Pilgrim pointed me to the EA download store, I of course had to see if there was a coupon code available before completing my purchase.  While I didn’t find a coupon code, I did find a sparkline.

RetailMeNot lets you find coupons for various stores, many coupons stop working or have certain requirements so it is helpful to other users to let them know whether you were able to use the coupon and waste their time.  The use of the sparkline shows how often people attempted to use the coupon and whether it was successful or not.

The only changes I would make would be to use a slightly more vibrant green color to represent the successful usage of the coupon; as on some with low success rates it was difficult to see that it was even there.

CodeMash v2.0.0.8 was a lot of fun; even if we did almost get hit by a train on the way there.  The next time I see Luc trying to get my attention I’m going to disregard him and look for oncoming trains!

Luc has a nice recap of the events as well.  Though I do have to say that my vocal skills are pretty poor, I only did well because I was playing on medium; I can barely pass songs on expert

Our data visualization talk went well; the biggest hitch we ran into was that there was only one microphone so I let Luc do all of the talking. Luc really lead the effort in getting the talk finished in time for the presentation so he deserves mad props for that.  We’ll be updating the materials based on the feedback and my notes to make it even more compelling.

The other day Luc submitted the abstract for a talk we want to give at CodeMash. Unlike the previous presentations we’ve done, this one isn’t going to focus on our products. This talk will focus on teaching attendees about what they can do when designing tables and graphs to make them easy to understand and show that some common data visualization practices would be better left not being practiced.

We’re still constructing the talk, but our plan is to focus not only on examples; but show how easy it can be to go from bad tables and graphs to great ones. Our talk will be during the vendor session; so instead of listening to marketing speak, come visit us and learn some useful information.

Today’s beta release brings us one step closer to Data Dynamics Reports v1.1 and we’re adding significant new functionality this release with a set of report items specifically designed to create dashboards.

The dashboards above illustrates the simplicity of the dashboard controls included with Data Dynamics Reports.

Continue reading this post for an explaination of the two new report items included in this build, bullet graph and sparkline.

Read the rest of this entry »

While exploring links for a post I’ll be putting up soon I came across a graph design IQ test from Perceptual Edge.  After reading Stephen Few’s Show Me the Numbers, I’ve come to appreciate great graph design, and it’s also opened my eyes to just how many bad graphs exist in the world.

I hope many of you get high scores on it, the test really is simple and hopefully it’ll start to open your eyes to creating better graphs.  To finish that journey I highly recommend Few’s book.