How to get a Vizify-like data visualization UI control? - user-interface

I looked over some popular frameworks like Tableau, FusionCharts, Charts.js, etc but didn't find a chart specific to my requirement. I need to visualize certain data in vizify.com or mind-map like manner i.e. one big circle at the center, an several small circles branching out. Each circle will have short text inside. It's not like a network graph where one node is connected to multiple node. It need not be interactive, but some fluid animation will be nice.
Platform: Windows 8 (Windows Store) app OR the web.
Please help.

I assume you could embed a web page inside of your app. If so, I would use D3.js. It is extremely powerful and flexible. There a ton of examples on their examples page.

Related

How can I draw images, lines, etc. on google maps

I'm investigating how I might best create an app that allows drawing of arbitrary shapes, images, etc. on google maps, based on lat/lon coords of the shapes or coords/rotations for images. Surprisingly I haven't found anything out there that offers much in the way of flexibility. Scribble-maps has created something close to what I'd aim for, but they're using flash. I'd ideally like to build something that draws on the google maps html map.
I suppose I could build a div, lay it on top of the map, and if I can listen on the map scroll/zoom events I should be able to figure out how to do everything myself. Thoughts?
You need to use overlays, check the Google API documentation.
There's an example of mouse interaction to draw lines in the Polyline Arrays section. To show images have a look at the Ground Overlays section.
I know this is a very a late response, but we have launched an API for Scribble Maps. You can check it out at http://www.scribblemaps.com/api/

Set a country background to my Google Geomap

A few days ago I've explored geomaps and, however, it turned out to be easy to change the properties of the elements.
But I have two questions:
I'd like to add rivers and forests on the maps. So Ive considered to set a background image instead of the geomaps figure. But I can't find a way to get this one fixed. Is there a way to set a background picture for a country or region?
How can I change the shape of the "bubbles" when you select a city e.g. "London"? I'd like to change it to a square.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Unfortunately what you're looking for is not available in geocharts in their current implementation.
Using a background image is possible in the sense that you can use CSS to make all shapes in the map transparent, and use a background image in the div to make it appear as if the little circles are being drawn on a map with forest and rivers, but you will run in to two big hurdles:
Your map will need to be identical in size/layout to the Google Maps SVG
If Google ever changes the SVG they use (or the view/projection they use) you will need to edit yours too
This isn't ideal, obviously. You could work around it by creating custom javascript to write rivers and forests on your map, but that is going to be a huge headache (especially if you are using multiple maps/views).
As for the circles, you can't change them to squares without hacking the actual SVG in the background with javascript. While this is definitely possible (if you're really good with SVG/Javascript), it again isn't using any of the fancy features of geocharts, and is more just a custom solution that will have to be updated if/when google updates their API.
Rather than doing it that way, you may want to look in to the same implementation on google maps itself. That will allow you to use custom markers, draw custom shapes, etc. with a lot more flexibility (and a much more stable API).

How to create big organization charts like google maps?

I don't know javascript (unfortunately) and I'd like to make a mindmap-like "organization chart" similar to this one:
This map should have an ability to zoom-in and zoom-out similar to google maps, and the ability to arbitrarily connect nodes. So it is more like a free graph, not like an ordinal tree. Mindomo makes this pretty well, but it is commercial and flash-oriented.
Does anybody know of a similar solution?
My research pointed me out that this could be a svg sketch, possibly generated offline, or maybe something using canvas. A click on the node should redirect to some web location.
Google maps is good because it also hides some details, and so should do this graph map in zoomed out projection.
A few important questions:
Do you need this generated in real time based on some underlying dataset?
Aside from zooming, should the user be able to manually open/close nodes?
You can manually generate this simply using some free tools:
MindMeister
xmind
freemind
although non-traditional, can you consider using Prezi?

Windows 8 Metro Style Horizontal design

I would like to ask which controls can be used to create a design similar to the built-in Weather app - that means different sets of data (tables, lists, etc.) that stretch horizontally and can be scrolled and can use the semantic zoom (which just shows the names of individual sections). I was trying to find some ways, but I have always found only examples using a list of same-type items, that are grouped somehow and shown in a GridView, but nothing similar to those built-in apps.
Thank you very, very much
You can achieve your goal using ItemTemplateSelector.
See here for more information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.itemscontrol.itemtemplateselector.aspx

Deep Zoom in Ajax - Possible? Any examples out there?

I have an idea to implement a deep zoom type interface hosted in a browser for sports training data (speed, distance, heart rate etc.) However, rather than images I actually want to zoom into a hierarchy of information. For example, the initial display would contain a grid of years - hover over 2008, for example, and spin the mouse wheel (or click) will zoom into that year but during the zoom I want 2008 to fade out and be replaced with a calendar of months. Again zoom into a month and the months are replaced with the months calendar, zoom into a day and you finally see a chart with the training data plotted on it. All the time only dates with actual data would be highlighted in some fashion.
My question is whether this would even be possible and whether anyone has seen examples of this already. I'm imagining that most of the time the next level of information could be cached in the browser (in fact, because this is calendar-based, I can calculate most of that and cache the dates to be highlighted.) I could also zoom into an empty chart whilst an Ajax thread is fetching the data to display.
I've never tried anything like this before and I'm especially interested in whether DHTML would be capable of this sort of zoom (I suspect not and I would have to resort to Silverlight) and whether the Ajax execution would be uninterrupted whilst the browser rendering thread is kept busy zooming.
For Deep Zoom on images in JavaScript/Ajax there's the excellent Seadragon Ajax library by Microsoft Live Labs.
If you're looking into smooth and interactive zooming on content besides images such as text, video & vectors, have a look at the open source OpenZoom SDK I've developed over the last couple of months.
You probably could not achieve very smooth zooming with an javascript/ajax type interface, but a zoom interface would be possible. The pragmatic ajax book has a great chapter on implementing a Google maps clone. Theres no need for the technique to be restricted to zooming in and out of tiled images. The image elements can just as easily be any HTML you want. A fade effect could be applied to the zoom operation so when you move up and down a layer you get something similar to what you described. I recommend grabbing the book (Its a pragmatic programmers book, so theres a cheap and immediately downloadable PDF version available. Read the chapter, think about the techniques and then see if you think its practical for your vision. good luck.
Seadragon Ajax continues to evolve and is now OpenSeadragon:
http://openseadragon.github.io/
I've also been keeping a list of various zooming technologies, many of which use JavaScript:
https://github.com/iangilman/zooming
I don't believe ajax or dhtml are good solutions for what you are trying to achieve. I think flash/flex or silverlight may be the best option.
Check out the "scale" effect in jQuery. Here's a link. I haven't used it myself, but it might be able to do what you want. You'd have to swap out some content for different content at the right point, or your html would get too big.

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