Little Logos

Hmm not sure if there is meat behind this buzz but does look interesting. Trendrr kinda does data visualisation, which I like. But not a lot new in terms of presentation. Upload and scratchpad looks interesting tho.

From what they say about themselves..

One of our goals while designing trendrr was to make data both easy to import and easy to export.

May post more on Trendrr laterr.

Some very cool websites on data visualisation. These are a few that I am going to go back to for ongoing inspiration.

The work of Golan Levin (who spoke at Lotusphere 2008) and Collaborators is found at flong - I especially like “the dumpster” and “the secret life of numbers”.

I am also still reading lots of material by Tufte. I recently purchased “Visualizing Information” and this is my gobag for reading pleasure.

A lovely representation of earthquake hotspots - by Robert Hodgin can be seen on his site.

Continued good reading at Juice Analytics.

From a post at Lifehacker from a post at juiceanalytics showed a cool way to put mini graphs in a cell next to the data in Excel. This is not new but a good reminder of what can be done with old fashion ASCII art.

Reminds me to go back and look at the work of Edward Tufte and his beautiful displays of information - I have used sparklines and other techniques from his books.

Also worth pointing out that this also works nicely in lotus notes and domino views using basically the same code and exactly the same technique.

The formulas in Notes for the above cols are:

@Repeat(”l”;NumberField) for a Number Field
and
@Repeat(”l”;@TextToNumber(TextField)) if a text Field

then you can format the col as you need

This was an interesting contract to build a data collection tool on an older PocketPC. Given that the client was probably going to:

• need further surveys
• use multiple devices 
• have a limited budget

I opted to buy a tool and build the survey using the tool rather than custom write the survey from scratch.

The tool I ended up with was from Pendragon Software and is called Forms.

The tool works on Palm and PocketPc and has adequate layouting and scripting functionality. It is a little slow with calculations but is excellent at managing survey deployment, versioning and managing data collected with different devices. On the pc end it uses a database backend that is starting to show its age.

Overall for the price it was a very good tool for the project and we were able to build and prototype the survey very quickly as a result. Because I didnt have to build any of the backend I was able to spend more time on building the survey logic and training the users and we still stayed on budget.