What's it all about, Alfie?

I was reading the Google Visualization groups today and 'VizGuy' responded that within the week, we should have the ability to set the format of the date/time in the upper-right hand corner of the AnnotatedTimeLine graph as well as setting the format of the numbers in the legend at the top of the graph. This is excellent news! This means that they are listening, and that I'll be able to get the format set before too much longer.

While I realize this isn't a big deal to Google, it's still a good indication that they are interested in moving this forward in response to user inputs. That's just the best news I've had all day.

Now I just need to sit tight for a few days... yup... it's gonna be tough.

[4/7] UPDATE: true to their word, the AnnotatedTimeLine now has a dateFormat preferences value that does exactly what I wanted it to do. I love it. Excellent work, Google.

This morning I needed to have a nice, simple, quick, date formatter for my Javascript code. Nothing fancy, but since Javascript really only allows you to manipulate the components of the date, and not really format it nicely, something else is needed. So I went 'a Googling. Found something that's really quite nice.

The idea is that with a simple:

  <script type="text/javascript" src="data.format.js"/>

you can then include in your java script code:

  var label = document.getElementById("label")
 
  label.innerHTML = dateFormat(new Date(), "HH:MM:ss mmmmm dd, yyyy");

where you had tagged the date/time field like this:

  <div id="label">this will be the time</div>

What I get in my code is the updated time and date of the last update to the data. It's pretty nice. A little CSS on the div tag and it's looking pretty nice. I have to say, I'm a little surprised that Javascript didn't have this, but to see it in the open source community makes me feel very good about Javascript. It's there, and it's really being supported by the developers.

So... if you need a Javascript date formatter, give this guy a look.

I noticed that VLC 0.9.9a is out with video performance on Intel Macs, fixes for the known issues with libxml2, and the addition of Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 stream decoding. All in all, it sounds quite nice, but the real reason I have to stay up with it now is the dependency on HandBrake. And there's nothing I've found that's nicer than HandBrake for ripping DVDs.

So it's a new upgrade, and might as well get it.

I've been working with the AnnotatedTimeLine for a few weeks now, and I'm simply amazed at the quality of the code contained in that widget. Oh, sure, it's not perfect. It's got update 'flicker', but on the whole, it's saved us a ton of time and it's price point is a lot cheaper than VantagePoint, the next-best alternative I know of for this kind of visualization.

I'm able to do the zoom in and out cleanly, I'm able to smooth (compress) the data nicely in Javascript - which, by the way, I'm now very interested in the speed of Javascript processing in a web browser, and very excited about Safari 4, and the next version of Firefox for the speed.

It's great to get a better understanding of Javascript as well. It certainly opens my eyes to the JSTalk project, and makes that far more interesting to me because I know it better now than I did. Lots to like there, too.

Yeah, this has been a great experience. I'm very interested in seeing what 'da Boss thinks of the app on Monday. I hope he likes it - whether he says so or not.

I have to admit that the process of adding polish to an AJAX web app is a lot like a regular app. Getting users to hammer on it - including yourself, and working to see what you can do to make it better, cleaner, smoother. The goal should be to have it work exactly like the user thinks it should act. Face it, it's a web page with a few widgets on it - it shouldn't require a manual to operate. If it does, then there are big problems.

So today I did a lot of little things - a few to the back-end, and a bunch to the front-end.

Probably one of the biggest things was the addition of the 'resolution' of the display. Face it, there may not bee the need to show all the data points, but maybe so. What I added was a very simple way of compressing the data (averaging points) so that the data looks 'smoother', but retains a lot of the shape of the original curve. It's going to make it more useful as it's footprint on the client will be smaller, and therefore faster to deal with on older machines.

It looks nice.

A wonderful little git repository visualization tool for Mac OS X - GitX, released an update this morning to 0.6.2. There were bug fixes to the history view as well several new features - including the ability to create a new repo. While I'll still probably remain a command-line type of guy, it's really nice to see this guy take shape and get more full-featured.

It's a wonderful source control system written for developers by developers. It's a joy to use.

For the last day or so I've been battling a nasty bug in Internet Explorer 6 (IE 6) when refreshing my Google Visualization widget with a simple Javascript timer. The problem was that for each refresh, the enclosing HTML table would expand horizontally. No joke. For each update/refresh of the widget, it seemed to "push" the div wider, and after a few minutes, it was twice the size of the initial graph.

Makes no bloody sense. But then again, it's IE 6 and I've read enough to know that I should expect a few of these, and to try and roll with the punches and see if I can't get something working.

The original HTML for the AnnotatedTimeLine wigdet was:

  <tr>
    <td>
      <div id="chart_div" style="align: center; width: 600px;
                                 height: 450px;"></div>
    </td>
  </tr>

and when I finally found this article, I realized that it was as easy as adding the overflow: hidden; attribute to the CSS for the div. The result being:

  <tr>
    <td>
      <div id="chart_div" style="align: center; width: 600px;
                                 height: 450px; overflow: hidden;"></div>
    </td>
  </tr>

With this, my updates of the Google AnnotatedTimeLine don't expand on IE 6, and it doesn't mess up the rendering on Firefox 3, either. Nice thing to know.

This morning I noticed that Camino 1.6.7 was out so I upgraded. The release notes say that in addition to the latest version of the Gecko rendering engine, there are several fixes and upgrades to the Flash block animations. Interesting, but again, Camino is third-tier web browser for me - Safari, Firefox and then Camino. Still... it's nice to see what it's doing and have the option to check things out with that rendering system. So I keep upgrading.

This morning I was finally able to get a good download of OmniGraphSketcher Beta 2 and have a little look. The two demo videos are exceptionally impressive, and being a sucker for data visualization tools, I just had to get it. The license is only $30, and for that, it's a deal. The visual way they allow the user to interact with the data and the graph is exactly the kind of tool I like. While DataGraph is nice and precise, this is more, well, of a sketcher. It seems to be focused on getting the data down on the graph - no matter what the form, and then embellishing it. Nice.

Not sure which one I'll use more, but it'll be interesting to see how they evolve in the coming months, years.

Miro is an odd fish, in my book. I'm not sure exactly what the source of the videos are, but I like the idea, and the tool is really quite nicely put together. This morning I noticed that they have a new release - 2.0.4, and it supposedly fixes a few issues. Again, since I haven't been using it a lot, I can't speak to the real problems solved, but I like to keep it current in the event that they have the kind of content that I'd like to see.

Specifically, episodes of House.

But I'll have to give it a little more time and see if they show up in the client. For now, it's an update and then back to work.