Writing

Panicky Addition

In response to the last post, a message from João Antunes:

…you should also read this story about Panic’s old MP3 player applications.

The story includes how they came to almost dominate the Mac market before iTunes, how AOL and Apple tried to buy the application before coming out with iTunes, even recollections of meetings with Steve Jobs and how he wanted them to go work at Apple – it’s a fantastic indie story.

Regarding the Mac ‘indie’ development there’s this recent thesis by a Dutch student, also a good read.

I’d read the story about Audion (the MP3 player) before, and failed to make the connection that this was the same Audion that I rediscovered in the O’Reilly interview from the last post (and took a moment to mourn its loss). It’s sad to think of how much better iTunes would be if the Panic guys were making it — iTunes must be the first MP3 player that feels like a heavy duty office suite. In the story, Cabel Sasser (the other co-founder of Panic) begins:

Is it just me? I mean, do you ever wonder about the stories behind everyday products?

What names were Procter & Gamble considering before they finally picked “Swiffer”? (Springle? Sweepolio? Dirtrocker?) What flavors of Pop-Tarts never made it out of the lab, and did any involve lychee, the devil’s fruit?

No doubt the backstory on the Pop-Tarts question alone could be turned into a syndicated network show to compete with LOST.

Audion is now available as a free download, though without updates since 2002, it’s not likely to work much longer (seemed fine with OS X 10.4, though who knows with even 10.5).

Tuesday, August 19, 2008 | feedbag, software  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.