How to undermine a good design: a case study
Graham Odds, June 14th, 2012
Tweet This article looks at a recent change to the BBC Weather website as an example of how over-use of information visualisation techniques and inconsistent design decisions can undermine what is otherwise an excellent content-first experience. I have watched with fascination over the last year as the BBC have undergone an extensive redesign of their [...]
WPF Charting Performance Comparisons (the Battle Continues)
Colin Eberhardt, April 24th, 2012
This blog post presents a thorough analysis of the performance of various WPF Charting components. The results show that a new class of charting solutions, which use raster-based graphics as opposed to retained mode vector graphics, provide a considerable performance advantage. Introduction Readers of my blog will know that charting and performance are two things [...]
Visualising StackOverflow Tag Relationships with Silverlight
Colin Eberhardt, February 20th, 2012
UPDATE: I have posted the sourcecode for this control on codeproject. Recently I have been wondering about the wealth of information that can be gleaned from the 2.5 million programming question on Stack Overflow. A few weeks back I found a tag trending tool, which can be used to measure the rise and fall in [...]
Infographics – info = graphics
Graham Odds, February 9th, 2012
Tweet This article presents a concern I have regarding the development of infographics and shows an example of the kind of critical thinking I believe the world of infographics is unfortunately all too often missing. In recent years, numerical infographics have become prevalent in print and on the web. There are even popular sites dedicated [...]
Ext JS 4 Stock Charts
Mark Rhodes, December 1st, 2011
I’ve been working with Ext JS 4′s pure Javascript charting package for a while now and due to the lack of decent real-world examples (i.e. those that don’t just use almost all default settings) and a few undue omissions in the documentation, it’s not always been plain sailing. In an attempt to rectify this situation, [...]
Adding Error Bars to Visiblox Silverlight Charts
Colin Eberhardt, October 21st, 2011
Having spent a number of years studying Physics at university, I have had the importance of error bars well and truly drummed into me! Within physics, or any experimental science, there are always going to be errors in the measurements you make. The more repeat measurements you make, the more confident you can be in [...]
A Critique of Radar Charts
Graham Odds, September 23rd, 2011
Tweet This article presents a critique of radar charts, a chart type commonly used to display multivariate data, highlighting how they are poorly designed to effectively communicate information in the underlying data, and presents a number of more effective alternatives Introduction Radar charts, sometimes known as spider, start or web charts, are a two-dimensional chart [...]
Updating Flex Sparkline to Flex 4
Graham Odds, April 19th, 2011
In a previous post I presented a library of
#uksnow #silverlight The Movie! – Happy Christmas.
Colin Eberhardt, December 24th, 2010
It’s Christmas Eve and time for some fun! A few weeks back I published an article on Reactive Extensions where I created a Bing Maps / Twitter mashup that plotted the geolocation of #uksnow twitter tags. This twitter hashtag was popularised by Be…
Visiblox, Visifire, DynamicDataDisplay – Charting Performance Comparison
Colin Eberhardt, December 10th, 2010
A few weeks ago I published a blog post which compared the performance of the Visiblox charts and the Silverlight Toolkit charts. The results indicated that the Visblox charts are considerably faster than the Toolkit charts, however Microsoft’s D…