Life is funny sometimes. For instance, this morning I blogged about Doug McCune's recent data visualization work, and then a few hours later David Mendels sent out an email about a new toolkit that was released last week to help developers with data visualization. The Flare Visualization Toolkit is "a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more."

The demo is impressive, but perhaps even more impressive is that Flare is based on a Java library called Prefuse. Its great to see Java libraries are being ported over to ActionScript 3 libraries as part of the same project (or at least the same domain).

Doug McCune posted a blog entry yesterday on some work that he is doing for map based data visualization with Flex. The (impressive) video from his blog post is shown below, and he has a sample application online that you can play with.

It reminded me of a similar application that I blogged about a while back, built by the team at Stamen Design that shows new homes and buildings being built in major cities throughout the US. I love how they've implemented time into the application with animation, bringing a 3rd dimension to the 2-d application. The blog also has a number of interesting stories of cities throughout the US.

Doug's work does something similar: it exposes data in a very intuitive and easy to understand application. The magic for these applications isn't in the data or the program, its in the UI and how they're using a different approach to displaying information. One can easily imagine how this information would be displayed for most police forces today: likely in a long table, or maybe on a physical map, with push pins for certain incidences. What's really impressive about the demo is how they integrate all the information, including the location of existing patrol cars, into a single application. Its not hard to imagine how useful this app could be. That's why the demo is so good.

Hindsight really is 20 / 20, and in the case of this application from the team at Stamen design (creators of the Digg visualizations and this real time cab mapping application), its also beautfiul. They've created a Flash application that shows you how neighborhoods have changed over the years, by mashing up housing information onto an online mapping system, and adding in time as another dimension to the visualization. The result is a beautiful time lapse image that shows how certain neighborhoods have been built up over the years.

There are a number of points over at O'Reilly on why they used Flash for this particular application, but the one that most caught my eye was this statement: "The use of Flash 9 specifically means we can throw around *much* more data than is currently possible with AJAX approaches (thousands of points in real-time - none of the data is pre-rendered)". That's the main reason that I think we (Adobe) will be the leaders in RIA development for years to come. I explained it to new hires at sales training this way...

Flash Player 8 added in a new video codec, and really started the online video revolution. The focus for Flash Player 8 was the new video codec, and the team obviously had a goal for enabling online video. The rest (YouTube) is history. Flash Player 9 does that same thing for RIAs. The new virtual machine in Flash Player 9 was rewritten specifically to handle large amounts of data that you'll find in RIAs like the Hindsight application. Over the next two years, similar to the timing for online video, you'll see a number of great applications take advantage of that new VM, and the huge speed increase. That's why I think Flash will win in the RIA market - Flash Player 9 is for RIAs as Flash Player 8 is for online video.

Getting back to the the app, it was built for Trulia, a real estate search portal, who also have a cool Ajax based heat map (is that an oxymoron?) that shows how hot a certain location's real estate market is.

Via the O'Reilly blog, and an email from Derek Wischusen. Visit Derek's site if you're interested in more information about Ruby on Rails and Flex working together.

Takayuki Fukatsu has created a pretty cool Flash application that allows you to see related items from Amazon.com. Starting with a simple search box, you type in a subject or book that you're interested in. Takayuki's Flash application makes a series of API calls back to Amazon, finding books that people are related to the one(s) you've searched for, using Amazon's 'people who bought this item also bought this item' API. After a few seconds, you get a cool visualization of related books. Check out this search for ActionScript 3 books on Amazon to see an example.

The site is done using Flash and ActionScript 3. The application is all the more impressive when you consider that ActionScript 3 for Flash is only available as a right now.

(Via)

TechCrunch has the story of a new startup, Geni, which uses Flash to manage your family tree. You start by adding yourself, then move to add your other family members: mom, dad, brothers, sisters, husband / wife etc... As you go, you have the option of inviting them to fill in more of their family tree, expanding your own family tree without making you do all the work. I've started mine, we'll see if my mom and dad continue filling in the rest of it.

I've posted other stories on using Flash for visualization of information, and this is no different. In this case, its displaying relations between human beings. Yes, we all know how great Flash is for online audio (blog post coming about that soon) and online video (blog post coming about that soon too), but its quickly geting a reputation as a great tool for visualization of data. (Digg Labs has two great examples showcasing the use of Flash to display data from Digg: Stack and Swarm.)

I'm interested in knowing how they're going to relate all these people to one another... Maybe email addresses, I guess, but I know a lot of people who have multiple email addresses. In any event, a cool site to check out and play around with for a few minutes.

One of the things that Flash and Flex are very good at is displaying complex information in a meaningful way to allow users to understand complex information more quickly. Many companies make their living doing just that: using Flash to display information to users in a way that allows them to understand the data immediately. Here are a few examples that I've come across recently.

The Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam recently launched a noise monitoring system built with Adobe Flex. Unfortunately the site isn't in English, but its still pretty cool, with a number of silos on the group representing the noise level, and animated graphics of airplanes taking off and landing. (From emearia.eu.)

Clicking on the blue items in the left hand naviation brings up other display options, such as graphs and tables, but the default view that overlays decible readings on top of a map is very cool.

In the US, companies like stamen design in San Francisco have done a lot of work in combining rich data with Flash, and displaying this in a way that makes sense immediately. They've done work with Digg recently on their Digg Stack and Digg Swarm, and have an impressive portfolio of other projects.

Other popular and well known projects would include Yahoo Maps, which allows you to display live traffic onto a Flex based map. So far, a lot of the noise for data visualization on the Internet has centered around maps and geographically dependent information, but as time goes on I'm sure the variety of data visualization tools and displays will expand.