Sparklines
In Edward Tufte’s new book Beautiful Evidence introduces us to the concept of a sparkline, intense, simple, word-sized graphics.
Joe Gregorio (a participant in the IETF AtomPub Work Group) designed an awesome Sparkline Generator Web Application. With it, you can create URL’s that codify a sparkline. Sparklines are designed so they can be embedded in your text without even thinking about it. That one isn’t a static graphic, if you look at the underlying URI, you’ll see that it hits his web application and gets a dynamically generated image back.
I also saw (for myself) the first use of a sparkline in a completely distinct web site, not specially related to Tufte’s work or yapping about sparklines in particular. If you go over to the Mashup page over at the Programmable Web, look at the Mashup Stats info box in the upper-left-hand corner of the page. You’ll see something like the box to the left.
The whole page is put together rather well and you should definitely check it out.
For even more industrious use of Sparklines, don’t forget about del.icio.us’ page on the topic.
There are sparkline libraries galore out there. The one for Ruby on Rails written by Geoffrey Grosenback (of nuby on rails fame) looks very impressive!
And, of course, my fingers shook nervously as I googled for, gasp, “wpf sparklines”. I wrote about this a long time ago. To my surprise, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of WPF activity on the topic. Am I missing something?