Possible Contender to Google’s AnnotatedTimeLine
This morning I was reading Daring Fireball and John pointed out an alternative to the Google Finance widget - the Google Visualization AnnotatedTimeLine. The HumbleFinance widget is a nice looking alternative to the AnnotatedTimeLine, but in it's current state it's too limited to really replace the AnnotatedTimeLine in my work.
First, it allows only two datasets. Normally, this is probably just fine as in a lot of finance you may just want to see an instrument price, or one instrument against an index - but for my graphs, well... I've had to limit the data in some pages to 64 datasets. It's just a different use-case when you're looking at risk across an entire firm.
Second, there are no annotations, and that's one of the most useful pieces of my web app. I'm able to overlay external events and trade events on the data to allow the users to see why the data is behaving as it is.
I'll certainly keep an eye on this as it gets better, it might get to the point that it can unseat the AnnotatedTimeLine. Then again, with Google dropping Gears in favor of HTML5 features, maybe it won't be too long and the AnnotatedTimeLine will be in HTML5 and we can get rid of Flash for the web app.