Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
If you want to get into interactive graphics for the web, Flash and Action-
Script is an excellent option. Flash applications are relatively quick to load,
and most people already have Flash installed on their computers.
It's not the easiest language to pick up; the syntax isn't that complicated, but
the setup and code organization can overwhelm beginners. You're not going
to have an application running with just a few lines of code like you would
with Processing. Later chapters take you through the basic steps, and you
can find a number of useful tutorials online because Flash is so widely used.
Also, as web browsers improve in speed and efficiency, you have a growing
number of alternatives.
useFuL FLash and acTIonscrIpT resources
a
Adobe Support
www.adobe.com/products/flash/whatisflash/
)—
Official documentation for Flash and ActionScript (and other
Adobe products)
Flare Visualization Toolkit (
a
http://flare.prefuse.org
)
a
Modest Maps (
http://modestmaps.com
)
hTML, JAVASCrIPT, AND CSS
Web browsers continue to get faster and improve in functionality. A lot of
people spend more time using their browsers than any other application
on their computers. More recently, there has been a shift toward visualiza-
tion that runs native in your browser via HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Data
graphics used to be primarily built in Flash and ActionScript if there were
an interactive component or saved as a static image. This is still often the
case, but it used to be that these were the only options.
Now there are several robust packages and libraries that can help you
quickly build interactive and static visualizations. They also provide a lot of
options so that you can customize the tools for your data needs.
For example, Protovis, maintained by the Stanford Visualization Group,
is a free and open-source visualization library that enables you to cre-
ate web-native visualizations. Protovis provides a number of out-of-the-
box visualizations, but you're not at all limited by what you can make,
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