21–24 of 24 posts
How does it decide which word to use initially? From what I can tell it picks the first one. I think the experience would be greatly enhanced if it did just a little extra processing and picked the most used word first. Or if it showed a list of the most used words that was selectable.
I see so many cool visualizations built with D3.js these days. All the libraries I used to build visualizations in the past were very limited and using them involved many tradeoffs, but D3.js seems just about limitless in what it can do. I can't wait to be able to give it a try. Too bad my company standardized on visualization toolkits some time before D3.js became a viable option.
My finding with D3 is that it chooses to give you power at the expense of ease. So you can do almost anything, but very little is simple. For most of it, you pretty much have to make all the shapes yourself with SVG, then use D3 to tie their dimensions and location to the data. So you have to know SVG from the get go. That's not a problem. It's a little weird with what it considers CSS stying vs node properties, but…
I see so many cool visualizations built with D3.js these days. All the libraries I used to build visualizations in the past were very limited and using them involved many tradeoffs, but D3.js seems just about limitless in what it can do. I can't wait to be able to give it a try. Too bad my company standardized on visualization toolkits some time before D3.js became a viable option.
My finding with D3 is that it chooses to give you power at the expense of ease. So you can do almost anything, but very little is simple. For most of it, you pretty much have to make all the shapes yourself with SVG, then use D3 to tie their dimensions and location to the data. So you have to know SVG from the get go. That's not a problem. It's a little weird with what it considers CSS stying vs node properties, but…
The biggest learning hump for me was understanding the way data is bound to DOM elements, and how a mismatch between the data and the selected DOM elements is handled. I never really understood until I read Mike Bostock's post "Thinking With Joins", at which point I attained d3 enlightenment: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/
edit: not to mention the growing library of user-made d3 plugins at https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins