A couple of weeks ago Jeffery Houser and John Wilker interviewed me about Axiis, and just yesterday posted the interview online. 

You can hear it here at The Flex Show.

Just an hour ago I wrapped up my presentation with Michael covering the alpha release of Axiis, the open source data visualization framework he and I have been working on for the last 5 months.

As fate would have it, I ended up coming down with the cold I had successfully resisted for two weeks from my two little boys, but I think the presentation went over well, despite my nasal delivery.

Michael did a phenomenal job of doing a live demo creating a chart from scratch. Unfortunately these sessions turned out to not be recorded, so perhaps we will do a screen cast of that demo.

We are really excited to get feedback from the community and move Axiis forward to its beta launch, which will hopefully be later this summer.

I wanted to give the community a quick update on Axiis (the data visualization framework Michael and I have been working on) as I have received a lot of interest from within the community after blogging about it a few weeks ago.   First, we have been hard at work improving the core layout and render engine getting ready for our initial alpha release, which will be on May 19th, 2008.    If that date sounds familiar, it should, it is right in the middle of 360 Flex, where my talk on data visualization will focus on Axiis and how I have been using to solve some of my advanced Flex Data Visualization needs.  Our first release will be very “alpha”, but we should have enough working bits for people to start playing around and get a taste of what we are doing.

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Well, I guess it is time to finally let the cat out of the bag.  For the past few months Michael VanDaniker and I have been working away on a new open source project we have named Axiis (you can thank Juan Sanchez for the great name.)   We are still a couple months away from our first public alpha release, but I think it is worthwhile spending some time to discuss the details of what we have been developing. 

Axiis represents a new way to conceive of and develop interactive data visualizations.   It is based on Flex and ActionScript 3.0 but has a uniquely different approach to creating visualizations than the standard Flex charts, and pretty much any other data visualization package I have seen.  Our primary goal in developing Axiis is to create very concise, expressive, and flexible framework that uses a purely declarative (markup) based approach to create anything from simple cartesian charts to very complex and involved data visualizations.  

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In doing client specific work, especially for business info-graphics, I often get client requests asking “can we see this in a pie chart?” For 90% of the use cases there is usually always a more effective way to visualize data than using a pie chart. As you may know, this is due to the fact that it is much harder to distinguish value differences in a polar layout than in more straightforward linear layouts (bar/column, etc.)

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The team over at Universal Mind has just launched a private beta of their flagship product, SpatialKey, a product that I first saw a prototype of back at Adobe MAX 2007.

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For those of you who were unable to attend Adobe MAX this year, Adobe was kind enough to record all of the sessions and release them publicly.   My session covered off on Data Visualization with Flex, and was structured as a high level overview, good for beginners to advanced users.  I primarily cover the use of Flex charts, and quickly go through several examples from the basics to more advanced customization.   The preso is relatively quick paced, but should give people a good overview of what options exist within the Flex Chart controls and how you might use them within your projects.

You can see a high-res HD version directly on AdobeTV here.   

Its Friday, and I told myself I would get some of my processing sketches up on the blog earlier this week.   This sketch is a study I was doing on fractal attractors.   A large portion of this code is taken directly from the work of David Bollinger and his FungiScrawl Processing work.   I found playing with this sketch to be very mesmerizing, and I slowly started to tweak David’s code to make subtle artistic changes in how the attractors were rendering.   

For those of you Action Script junkies, reading the source code of Processing should be fairly easy, as it is Java.   One of the coolest things about this code is that David is dumping everything into an off-screen pixel-buffer and performing his own anti-aliasing and via a 4 pass sub-sampling algorithm.    So that might sound really sophisticated and complicated, but the code is actually very easy to read and was very approachable.    Some of what I have learned here I suspect will make its way into the guts of Degrafa at some point.

Early this week, quite by coincidence, Juan at scalenine showed me this by Matt Kenefick, which is almost exactly like what I have done here, but with Flex and AIR… way cool Matt!

I have several other features in this sketch (application in Processing parlance) that I was exploring, like being able to record certain gestures and then paste them in later, as well as other neat ways to manipulate the attractor code for different visual effects.

In doing various experiments with Processing, I have really found that it has been immensely helpful to see the source code of others.  Since I consider Processing more for artwork/play, than business, I see algorithms as just different tools to accomplish certain artistic goals.   It is really amazing when you can combine different pieces of code from different sources to achieve really interesting and amazing results.

So like the work I have done with Adobe Flex I am releasing some of my experiments for others to see/use. But unlike my work in Flex, I am not making too much effort to “clean” up the source code, so please view source at your own peril, as lots of stuff is just hacked together in a very brittle fashion.

So have at it and enjoy.

I was working on a couple of new geometry objects for Degrafa this evening, and I ran across this sample I had come up with a few months back.  It was just some playing around with repeaters, and I thought I would post it as I think it is pretty impressive for only 30 lines or so of code.

You can see the demo here.