Visualizing Proportions - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 167

data that wouldn't work as a static stacked area chart, but use it with an
interactive chart, and make it easy to browse and explore. You could do
this in JavaScript with Protovis, but for the sake of learning more tools
(because it's super fun), use Flash and ActionScript.

P The
NameVoyager
by Martin Wat-
tenberg made the
interactive stacked
area chart popu-
lar. It is used to
show baby names
over time, and the
graph automati-
cally updates as
you type names
in the search box.
Try it out at www
.babynamewizard
.com/voyager .

Online visualization has slowly been shifting away from Flash
toward JavaScript and HTML5, but not all browsers support the
latter, namely Internet Explorer. Also, because Flash has been
around for years, there are libraries and packages that make cer-
tain tasks easier than if you were to try to do it with native browser
functionality.

Luckily you don't have to start from scratch. Most of the work has already
been done for you via the Flare visualization toolkit, designed and main-
tained by the UC Berkeley Visualization Lab. It's an ActionScript library,
which was actually a port of a Java visualization toolkit called Prefuse.
We'll work off one of the sample applications on the Flare site, JobVoyager,
which is like NameVoyager, but an explorer for jobs. After you get your
development environment set up, it's just a matter of switching in your
data and then customizing the look and feel.

You can write the code completely in ActionScript and then compile it into
a Flash file. Basically this means you write the code, which is a language
that you understand, and then use a compiler to translate the code into
bits so that your computer, or the Flash player, can understand what you
told it to do. So you need two things: a place to write and a way to compile.

The hard way to do this is to write code in a standard text editor and then
use one of Adobe's free compilers. I say hard because the steps are defi-
nitely more roundabout, and you have to install separate things on your
computer.

The easy way to do this, and the way I highly recommend if you're plan-
ning on doing a lot of work in Flash and ActionScript, is to use Adobe
Flex Builder. It makes the tedious part of programming with ActionScript
quicker, because you code, compile, and debug all in the same place.
The downside is that it does cost money, although it's free for students.

Download
Flare for free at
http://flare
.prefuse.org/ .