Jason Sundram of runningwithdata.tumblr.com took the Streamgraph open source code and produced a port to processing.js with a number of very cool examples.

Check out the examples and source code at http://runningwithdata.tumblr.com/post/566345323/streamgraph-js

Rock on!

Not quite two years ago, I published a paper with Martin Wattenberg titled “Stacked Graphs — Aesthetics and Geometry” in which we discussed the problems surrounding the use of stacked graphs, and presented a new stacked graph layout technique we called Streamgraphs. Streamgraphs had been seen before in a project I did with last.fm data called Listening History as well as in a graphic in the New York Times called Ebb and Flow at the Box Office.

I’ve finally gotten to consolidating the code used to produce the graphics for the paper, cleaning them up and adding crucial comments for better understanding. It’s presented as a processing applet, and available on github.

You can now download the source code for Streamgraphs.

I love openFrameworks, but there a few things it just doesn’t do well. Namely joystick events.

openFrameworks uses a windowing system under the hood called GLUT, or the openGL Utility Toolkit. GLUT’s primary benefit is being exceptionally simple and ubiquitous. Anywhere you can use openGL, you can use GLUT. However GLUT has it’s limitations; in it’s simplicity it lacks full featured events from keyboards, mouse and joystick controllers.

That’s where SDL comes in. SDL is similar to GLUT in many ways, but rather than being made as a general purpose utility like GLUT, it is targeted at simple video game creation. This gives it quite reasonable joystick controller and mouse event support.

Thanks to the work over the last year, openFrameworks has become more and more abstracted from it’s windowing toolkit. This was vital for getting openFrameworks to seamlessly work on an iPhone, where GLUT doesn’t exist. I took advantage of this abstraction and made an addOn called ofxSDL. It will cause openFrameworks to use SDL rather than GLUT as it’s windowing system, giving you access to better joystick support.

ofxSDL is still in infancy, and there is a list of todo items before it could be considered finished, but I wanted to put it out there for anyone interested to use and give feedback on.

If you don’t already use Dropbox, you should.

Besides keeping your files backed up and computers in sync, it also allows you to share files with others. You’ll never cringe at attaching huge files to emails ever again. However the links to these shared files can look kind of cryptic and unprofessional. If you’re sharing files with clients, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/918273645/file.zip just doesn’t cut it.

I decided to remap these urls to something a little more legible, professional, and just incase a link to a public file starts getting shared like crazy: an intersticial.

I added a subdomain to my website, http://box.leebyron.com to use as the base URL for these links. http://box.leebyron.com/file.zip is the goal.

There are two files in this new subdomain, .htaccess and index.php. Similar to how pretty-urls and custom 404s are implemented.

Check out these files at http://gist.github.com/326328.

I meant to publish this a long time ago, but time slipped by me. Better late than never.

In my senior year I gave a presentation to the IDSA in which I had to summarize my work in 7 minutes. I opted to speak over a video, rather than a powerpoint, since it would force me to stick to my time-limit.

It’s been too long since this presentation, and I forget my speech, so you’ll just have to imagine what it was I was babbling while this played.

The central theme was the power of using computation and data in design to create things previously impossible.

This past weekend I had the pleasure to speak at ONA09 in a panel (#ONAux) with Aron Pilhofer and Elliott Malkin of the NYT and Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. I spoke briefly about the new challenges of designing online, the importance of capturing attention, and specifically how animation and interaction can help draw viewers in to interactive graphics.

I’m happy to make public the slides I used for my talk at /else/ona09.

I made reference to The Dot and The Line, and some of my work at the NYT:

• A Map of Olympic Medals
• Winners in a Long Presidential Campaign
• A Collection of Olympic Torches

Playing with some maps this evening. It’s pretty interesting to see San Francisco by only its altitude contours.

Should have shared this here a long time ago, back in January I put together this data-driven motion graphic showing (in real time) when and where new friend connections on Facebook are made.