In December our team was allowed two weeks to pursue a “passion project”. It didn’t have be work-related, just something you truly wanted to work on. I chose to design tread patterns on the soles of shoes. I had never given a thought about shoe treads until, a week earlier, a woman on the NodeBox… Read More
Tag: nodebox
In this post I will simultaneously have Fun With Data and Fun With Maps. I will use public APIs to turn my Isle of Alameda into a “choropleth“, a map which displays areas that are colored or patterned in relation to data. To do this I will need to find boundaries within Alameda that I… Read More
The best way to learn how to make your own maps is to map someplace familiar. The place I live, Alameda, is an island in the San Francisco Bay, but existing maps don’t do it justice. So as part of my Fun With Maps project I set out to disentangle Alameda from the urban sprawl… Read More
Maps are one of the oldest and most powerful forms of visualization. Lately I’ve been learning how to make my own maps using open source data and public APIs. I started by simply plotting locations on a world map. World maps in svg format are readily available on the web. Wikimedia Commons, for example, has… Read More
In my previous entry, Fun with Facebook, I described how to pull data from Facebook’s Graph API Explorer, organize it using NodeBox, and turn it into representations of friends, posts, and the “likes” that connect them. Here is the final result: The above image is a snapshot of a high-resolution poster with many fine details.… Read More
I am often surprised by which of my Facebook posts are the most liked and by who likes what. I wondered: are there any interesting patterns there? Could I visualize them? My next question (as always) was: could I get the data? Thanks to the rise of the API economy I could. Companies have discovered… Read More
One month before we entered the OAUX Exchange tent at OpenWorld, Jake (@jkuramot) challenged us to come up with a visualization “that would ambiently show data about the people in the space.” Mark (@mvilrokx), Noel (@noelportugal) and I accepted the challenge. Mark put together the Internet of Things ultrasonic sensors, Noel created a cloud database… Read More
We are always on the hunt for interesting new uses of the Apple Watch, so when my colleague Ben Bendig alerted me to AstroPad’s new iPhone/Apple Watch app, I downloaded it immediately. The app, AstroPad Mini, is intended to let you use your iPhone as a graphics tablet and controls Photoshop nicely right out of… Read More
