Designer Silverlight

For everyone who wants to take a look, here are the slides for my MIX10 information visualization talk.

MIX10 “Effective Information Visualization in Silverlight

I’ll post the code from the presentation when I catch my breath.

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I haven’t posted in a while due to my schedule. But I have also clearly lost my mind as evidenced by the fact that I managed to write and perform half of a rap battle without once thinking to myself, “This is clearly an insane idea.”

Jason Alderman and I wrote and performed a rap battle for an Ignite presentation at Ignite Salt Lake. Jason took the side that developing web applications for mobile phones is the best way to go and I took the side that native applications are more appropriate for mobile development. The slides can be found here.

Geeky? In the extreme. But I enjoyed it.

And if you don’t like to hear people laughing over the laughable lyrics:

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Sorry for my prolonged absence. My world has been taken over somewhat due to my recent moonlighting as an information visualization guy. Take note that I’m not by any means an “expert”… I’m more of an “enthusiast”, but that was apparently enough to get me on CNN.

I’ll post more videos as I create them for CNN. I’m also working on a chapter for an O’Reilly book called “Beautiful Visualization” that will be out next year.

All of this to say that I’m trying to get back into the WPF/Silverlight blogging as soon as I can, but I need to clear my plate a little first.

UPDATE: The presentation is online:

I gave a presentation on data visualization at Ignite Salt Lake last night, and I thought it went pretty well. (I wasn’t hiding my face and sneaking out of the theater afterward.)

Here are the slides from the night with my notes.

I Once Was Blind: Building an Information Visualization That Means Something

I’ll post video as soon as it becomes available.

Below are links to the visualizations that I referenced:

Slide 3 (overview): Visualization of the Stimulus Bill

Slide 5 (Ask a question, tell a story): Charles Minard’s info vis of Napoleon’s march

Slide 9 (Size Visualization Example): Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” visualized with Wordle

Slide 11 (Color Visualization Example): Map of the Market – stock market visualization

Slide 13 (Location Visualization Example): Map of flights in the US in a 24 hour period. This actually uses color to indicate altitude (darker is higher, lighter is lower, but I didn’t have time to go into that in my talk.

Slide 15 (Network Visualization Example): My Facebook friends as graphed by Nexus Graphs

Slide 17 (Time Visualization Example): The Baby Name Voyager – an information visualization on when people name their babies what

Slides 18 – 20 (How Much Is a Trillion Dollars?): Visualization of a Trillion Dollars

Places to get data

• Amazon Web Services Data Sets – Including the human genome, DNA sequences, chemical databases, census information, DOT databases on transportation (aviation, highway, bike, maritime, etc)
• New York Times developer site: the NYT has easy APIs for articles, best sellers, campaign finance, user comments, congress, movie reviews, and the New York State Legislature
• Yahoo Developer Network – APIs for finance, traffic, weather, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and many others
• Twitter API documentation
• Bureau of Labor Statistics – Information on all sorts of economic statistics for the US
• FEC Data – public database for all political giving. WARNING: Very poorly kept, standards are obviously not a big deal to these guys

Visualizations I didn’t use, but that are still cool

Twitter tags during the Super Bowl

Google Heat Map of where users look when they get a Google search result (scroll down a bit)

Videos taken in and around Salt Lake City

Twitter network browser – this one is more fun to play with than it is useful

I will have no time to write real blog posts (I’m actually writing this during Robby Ingebretsen’s fantastic session: “Design Fundamentals for Developers”), but I will be updating on Twitter like a maniac. You can see my twitter feed here.

I’ll try to tweet something from every session I attend.

When are we going to get rid of Daylight Savings Time? It makes no sense at all.

Besides, then I’ll be able to sound like Grandpa Simpson when I’m older. “When I was your age, we had these great American traditions. We changed the time around just cause we wanted to and we put people with no dramatic experience on TV and called it ‘reality’. Oh, yeah, and we had TV… it was like a computer except you couldn’t really do anything except choose between the four things that were on at that exact moment. And the world didn’t revolve around you… if you missed the beginning of the show, tough beans!”

Mike Swanson has updated his Adobe Illustrator-to- XAML plug-in.

It now supports WPF and Silverlight conversions in addition to making the files smaller by getting rid of unneccessary precision. I tagged it with delicious, but this is important enough to earn its own post.