Periscopic Now

Occasionally people will ask us about our process, and today was one of those days.

So here it is, in all of its cryptic beauty.

It’s simple, really.

(And that’s drawn on our conference table, which is sometimes also part of the process.)

We’ve been attending all of the Portland Data Visualization Group meetings, and the next one looks like it will be just as good as past events.  It’s going to be on Wednesday, October 19th from 6:30 – 8:30 at Collective Agency. Many more details here.

Great lineup of speakers, including Nate Bergey (where can we buy an ISS-Notify?), Kevin Lynagh, Charlie Loyd, Aaron Parecki, and Periscopic co-founder, Dino Citraro.

Special thanks to Second Story for sponsoring the event!

Looking forward to talking shop with like-minded  data-heads.

Although it’s still early in the evolution of HTML5, we’ve started to receive many requests to develop data visualization projects in HTML5 instead of Flash.

In most cases, these requests have been related to a desire to reach a wider audience, and the belief that HTML5 will be more compatible than Flash. We’ve also heard a lot of people mention that they need to have their visualizations work on the iPad.

These are reasonable expectations and requests, so we did some research to find out exactly which audiences we could reach by deploying a large data visualization project .... read on ›

Recently Adobe AIR made became a significantly stronger tool. It now is capable of running native applications via the NativeProcess API. While NativeProcess is only available when outputting to a native installer and targeting the extendedDesktop profile, it is invaluable when an AIR application requires all the privileges allowed to a Java or C# app. A limitation of NativeProcess, however, is its inability to interact with certain command line utilities, features, and applications written in interpreted languages (such as Python).

In order to sidestep this shortcoming we wrote two pieces: a small C++ based application which acts as a proxy and an .... read on ›

When creating movement and transitions in a user interface I encounter situations where traditional easing functions are not as flexible as is necessary.

Enter: Twine, a simple utility we created to combine easing functions in a variety of manners. It allows us to sculpt complex tweens by mixing easing functions, or splicing them end to end while maintaining control over the relative proportions of each primitive function.

The syntax used by Twine is compatible with most tweening engines including TweenLite and Tweener. Twine uses the ability of these engines to pass a parameters object to a tweening function; the profile of the .... read on ›