[HN Gopher] Show HN: Vizzu - Open-source charting library focuse...
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Show HN: Vizzu - Open-source charting library focused on animating
charts
Author : vidipeti
Score : 90 points
Date : 2021-10-17 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lib.vizzuhq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lib.vizzuhq.com)
| jitl wrote:
| Looks like an interesting library. It's cool to see practical
| examples of C++ drawing via WebAssembly. This is how Figma works
| and is fast, but Figma isn't open source. I'm saving a link so I
| can go read the source later.
|
| My feedback: replace the gif on the front page with your library!
| I thought it was an actual example and thought "cool idea but the
| implementation is slow and blurry". But it works much better in
| the JSFiddle! Why not have some real examples here? There should
| be three at least - with a button to toggle between states. Your
| example pages also aren't very mobile-screen responsive, could
| use a bit more love. (Browsing on iPhone 12 Pro Max)
| vidipeti wrote:
| Thanks! Really useful tips.
| gavinray wrote:
| The best example of WASM being used to render to canvas (it's
| also visualizations) I've seen is "Perspective":
|
| https://perspective.finos.org/ "Perspective is
| an interactive analytics and data visualization component,
| which is especially well-suited for large and/or streaming
| datasets. Originally developed at J.P. Morgan and open-sourced
| through the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), Perspective
| makes it simple to build user-configurable analytics entirely
| in the browser, or in concert with Python and/or Jupyterlab.
| Use it to create reports, dashboards, notebooks and
| applications, with static data or streaming updates via Apache
| Arrow." "A fast, memory efficient streaming query
| engine, written in C++ and compiled for both WebAssembly and
| Python. read/write/streaming for Apache Arrow, and a high-
| performance columnar expression language based on ExprTK."
| antman wrote:
| Firefox on iphone, buttons on perspective are not clickable.
| sigg3 wrote:
| This reminds me of the late, great professor Hans Rosling.
| vidipeti wrote:
| Thank you! Hans Rosling's work is an important source of
| inspiration for us. With Vizzu we hope to empower people to
| build engaging, animated data stories, just like Mr. Rosling
| did.
| vidipeti wrote:
| I work in a small team in Budapest, Hungary, and this library is
| our first product, currently in public beta.
|
| It works similarly to other charting libs, but when users create
| a set of charts, Vizzu will automatically animate between them.
| Thus, we think it is suitable for storytelling and building
| interactive data explorers.
|
| The library is dependency-free, written in C++ and compiled to
| WebAssembly. It has automatic data aggregation and filtering
| capabilities, and we set the defaults used based on dataviz
| guidelines.
|
| A short summary of how we built Vizzu: First, we created an
| engine that provides a standard interface for several chart
| types. Then we looked at the parameter space of this engine and
| made each parameter interpolable, turning our engine into a
| generic chart morpher that can continuously interpolate between
| any charts that can be described on its interface. After that, we
| analyzed these transitions and came up with rules that make them
| self-explanatory and easy to follow for the viewers, and finally,
| we embedded these rules into the engine.
|
| We've been working on Vizzu for quite some time and decided to go
| open-source because we want to make it easy for others to try it
| and build whatever they want while helping us figure out how the
| animation capability can be put to good use.
|
| We created a step-by-step tutorial and examples that you can
| start playing with in JSFiddle by clicking on the "Edit" button
| on each example's page.
|
| Tutorial: https://lib.vizzuhq.com/0.3.0/
|
| Examples: https://lib.vizzuhq.com/0.3.0/#examples-1.1
|
| All suggestions and criticism are very welcome.
| gavinray wrote:
| Just went through the examples -- I thought it was really neat!
|
| Often times I want/need to display data in more than one
| format. Usually I just take up a bunch of page space by putting
| multiple charts.
|
| Here's an example showing what I mean from actual project:
|
| https://github.com/hasura/graphql-bench/raw/master/app/hasur...
|
| If there was a solid and comprehensive charting library that
| could "tween" between the chart formats, only taking up the
| space of 1 chart, that would be a neat solution!
|
| Have you found certain pairs/combinations of charts that expose
| hidden relationships when you display them by animating the
| data points between them?
| vidipeti wrote:
| Thanks! :) This tweening and space saving is what we built
| Vizzu for! Do you think you could give it a try?
|
| Regarding the combinations: it really depends on the data and
| the relationship you're looking for. We hope to make
| experimenting with such pairs or even series of charts easier
| with our lib.
|
| Here are a couple of examples that worked well for us in
| certain settings:
| https://lib.vizzuhq.com/0.3.0/#example-1.1.12
| https://lib.vizzuhq.com/0.3.0/#example-1.1.15
| https://lib.vizzuhq.com/0.3.0/#example-1.1.3
| triptych wrote:
| Seems pretty straightforward to use. I got it working in
| Observable here https://observablehq.com/@triptych/hello-vizzu
| vidipeti wrote:
| WOW! That is so awesome! Thanks!
| XCSme wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| Any reasons I would use Vizzu apart from the alternatives? I am
| currently using Chart.js and I am happy with it.
| vidipeti wrote:
| Thanks! Chart.js is an excellent charting library and much more
| mature than Vizzu currently. The key advantage of Vizzu is the
| embedded animation capability. You set up two charts, and you
| can morph from one to the other and vice versa out-of-the-box.
| The automatic data aggregation & data filtering feature is
| pretty unique as well.
| jamessb wrote:
| Interesting - with the focus on animations, Vizzu seems most
| similar to Gemini/Gemini2
|
| https://github.com/uwdata/gemini
|
| https://uwdata.github.io/gemini-editor/
|
| https://uwdata.github.io/gemini2-editor/
| [deleted]
| wilsonfiifi wrote:
| Slightly off topic but does anyone work with server generated
| charts at all? Or is there not much demand for pdf reports?
|
| Last I checked, converting Javascript charts to PNG is still a
| hacky/convoluted process.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I have a need for this as well. Many of the go-to packages from
| years ago seem abandoned.
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(page generated 2021-10-17 23:00 UTC)