Interactive Bubble Chart
June 29th, 2006
[original]: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2006/04/02/business/20060402_SECTOR_GRAPHIC.html
[demo]: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/InteractiveBubble/InteractiveBubble.html
[src]: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/InteractiveBubble/srcview/
[zip]: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/InteractiveBubble/srcview/InteractiveBubble.zip
[comments]: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/2006/06/29/samples-blast-part-2-interactive-bubble/
The New York times has a really nice interactive bubble chart known as the Sector Graphic Chart. As a proof of concept, I put a few hours into seeing how hard it would be to recreate this chart using the Flex Charting components.
Take a look at the original version:
* [NY Times Sector Graphic][original].
Now before you go poking at the Flex version, Let me make one thing clear. __The version I’ve put together is only a small portion of the functionality in that chart__. As far as I know, that’s not due to any inherent limitations of the Flex charting components, but rather to the fact that I only put a few hours of work into this. Putting up a polished, produced and published application to be compared against a quick code sample is generally not a smart thing for me to do ;). But with only a few hours of work I was able to add the most visible and impressive interaction to the basic bubble chart supplied by the flex framework. It shouldn’t take too long for someone to take this example and turn it into a full fledged polished and working chart like the Sector Graphic.
Alright, with that caveat, here it is:
* [Interactive Bubble Chart][demo]
* [View the source][src]
* [download the source][zip]
Some of the noteworthy concepts demonstrated by this example include:
* Custom Bubble Item Renderer
* Custom interactive Pan/Zoom chart element
* Custom Axis Renderer
That last one is the real kicker. Between Beta3 and Release, we added the option of dropping your own component in as a custom axis renderer on a chart. Take a look.
Comments, Questions, Feedback? [Tell me all about it here.][comments]
June 29th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
[...] Interested in building customized, interactive charts? A while back I spent a few hours trying to mimic the excellent Sector Graphic chart from the New York Times Online. See the demo and browse the source here. [...]
October 17th, 2006 at 2:41 am
[...] Interested in building customized, interactive charts? See the demo and browse the source here. [...]