Dense Visualizations in the Finance Industry
I think one of the things I really like about the Finance Industry - certainly creating applications and visualizations for it, is the density of the visualizations and applications. Most finance applications are running on machines that have a ton of other things running, and the users want to see as much data as possible. I've seen traders with dual 30" monitors and an additional three 19" monitors all tied to a raft of machines - all just to get the data they need in front of their eyes for the trades. It's pretty impressive.
I have to say I'm the same way. I love the visual density of the information in graphs and well designed tables. So when the users in London asked me to essentially fuse two pages together - and two of the more complex, active, pages at that, I had to rise to the challenge.
This fusion page has the Google AnnotatedTimeLine widget on it for the intraday values of several portfolios, and it also has a Google Table widget to contain the product-level values for the components of those portfolios. There are a few other things, but these two are going to update independently of each other with the trigger being the same timer event. So they will be close, but not really in sync.
Today I did most of the HTML/CSS layout to get the components on the page. This is necessary because the AnnotatedTimeLine is really two stacked on top of each other to function as a double-buffered system. We draw to the 'back' one, then flip them. Pretty simple, but necessary because of the delays in updating the ATL with new data.
I'll be able to put the AJAX behind this when I get back on Tuesday. Nice to have a three-day weekend!