ScaleNine

I’ve been getting more interested in data visualization lately, which came across in the presentation I did with Tony Hillerson at 360|Flex San Jose. Part of that presentation involved gathering and visualizing personal data as a means of discovery and insight into our day to day.

One example involved Tony and I running RescueTime for about a weak and a half to capture what applications we used, sites we visited, the duration of usage, etc. Unfortunately, we ran out of time during the presentation to demo the example, but it was interesting to see the patterns that bubbled to the surface an how we compared to each other.

I’m very interested in being able to easily capture and visualize personal data. There is so much that can be seen beyond a series of numbers. Part of the reason why I think data visualization as a medium hasn’t caught on is because it can be hard to do. Imagine being able to visualize any data set as easily as it is to upload an image to Flickr or a video to YouTube.

I came across this site called Many Eyes which was created by scientists at the IBM Research Center. The site allows anyone to upload a data set to be turned into a data visualization and made available for sharing. The goal of the site is summed up by creators, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas:

We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience, to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.

Right on! I wanted to immediately start trying things out on the site, but it’s a work in progress and it ran pretty slow. As soon as the site is more accessible I want to upload the data Tony and I got from RescueTime and see what it creates. Until I can get an example of my own, here’s an example that was used in a NY Times article about the site, which shows occurrences of names in the New Testament:

Tony Hillerson and I did a presentation on exploring the world of data visualization while at 360|Flex San Jose. We were late getting our stuff together, so the presentation and source code wasn’t on the thumb drive handed out at the conference. Thanks for everyone who showed up, and all great feedback we got.

Tony has more information regarding the source code on his blog. We’re thinking about evolving these samples as we have the time, so you may want to continually check back (no promises).

The video is now available here or through the 360|Flex feed for AMP.

I’m excited to announce that the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge” is officially under way! If you’ve ever entertained the idea of making a skin and submitting to ScaleNine, nows your chance to win some great prizes in the process. We’re looking for entries to award a first, second and third prize to people who create an awesome theme for Flex 3.

We were able to pull together some amazing prizes and judges with help from Adobe and EffectiveUI. Prizes for first place include:

• (1) MacBook Air with SSD
• (1) Ticket to MAX North America or Europe
• (1) Copy of Adobe CS3 Master Suite
• (1) Copy of Flex Builder Professional
• And a Feature on the Adobe Developer Network

With those prizes you can picture yourself at Adobe MAX sitting at the keynote with your MacBook Air coding away while people point and ask, “Hey, isn’t that the guy featured on the Adobe Dev Net? You know, the one who won that contest?” We’ve got some great prizes for second and third place, as well as “spot prizes” for people who put forth a strong effort.

You might be thinking, “I’m no designer” or “I’m no coder”, but why not team up with someone? You can find a designer or developer to collaborate with and divvy up the prizes. It’s a great excuse to get up to speed with skinning Flex components and thanks to Andrew Shorten, Adobe Platform Evangelist, you’ve got several tutorial videos to learn from.

Get all the information about the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge”

Also, I’d like to thank Patrick Hansen, UX Designer from EffectiveUI, for making that sweet logo for the contest; Paulo Rizkalla, Developer for EffectiveUI, for helping me with some website stuff; and Mike Potter and Andrew Shorten of Adobe for their help putting this all together.

Adaptive Path put together a proof of concept for a new way of browsing the web as part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Browser Series. Adaptive Path gives a description of the project, called Aurora:

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series.

Being able to directly manipulate content in the browser, have a seamless browsing and collaboration experience, and the methods shown for organizing user content are definitely somethings worth shooting for. Granted I’m a guy who uses key commands or gestures wherever possible to avoid the Finder, drilling down to look for files, or using the mouse to access menu items.