Raw: the missing link between spreadsheets and vector graphics

[gfosco]

I suggest making the landing page a bit more clear... I sat there looking at the single sentence thinking, "What?" It's not so much a missing link between anything, as it is a way to create visualizations from your spreadsheet data, if you feel comfortable enough to paste it on a random website.

[bradleyland]

I felt similar confusion when I read that slug.

"Create visualizations from your spreadsheet data"

That's what this does. The "missing link" cliché didn't score any points with me, but the product looks extremely cool.

One other point of feedback, I clicked the "How it works" link, and when the page scrolled down, the animation was already on step 4, but that text is small, so I didn't realize I was watching the last step. I was a bit confused.

Maybe consider using a scroll position detection library to hold the animation until the user has it in view, or use something more clear to indicate which step is being illustrated:

[1] 2 3 4

1 [2] 3 4

1 2 [3] 4

1 2 3 [4]

[danmaz74]

Absolutely. There is also no clue that the page should be scrolled down. And the video tutorial should be featured on the landing page.

[teamonkey]

For me the missing link would be a clean way of getting Excel data into a format that could be read by my D3 scripts without needing custom macros, exporting to Excel's flaky CSV format and a manual reload at the end.

Writing the graph code is the FUN bit.

[nonchalance]

    Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1048576) (tried to allocate 12288 bytes) in /var/www/raw.densitydesign.org/public/wp-includes/option.php on line 553

[OliverM]

My startup's in a similar space: http://getbulb.com (beta is invite only for the next couple of weeks, but if you're curious and want a go, fire an email asking to [email protected], free to use currently)

I adore Density Design's work, and some of it was inspiration for what I'm doing now, so seeing this kind of thing is both validating & scary!

[shortstuffsushi]

You know what's really crazy about this project? They have two guys named giorgio, on a four man team.

But seriously, this project looks pretty cool. It's an interest way to create quick visuals without writing any code.

[danmaz74]

Giorgio is a pretty common name in Italy, where the team is :)

[joliv]

Anyone else getting a 503 error when trying to access the service?

[davvid]

All the more reason to just clone it and try it out ;-) It's pretty awesome, actually. Clone it then just npm install -g bower && (make sure bowser is in your path) && npm install && npm start

[himal]

Yes, same here.

[carlob]

Hi from Italy, nice job!

To be a little nitpicky: why did you start with obscure high-dimensional visualizations such as alluvial plots, dendrograms, sphere packings? I believe there is much value in the classics: bar charts, histograms, scatter plots; one should only move to more complex visualizations if there is absolutely no way to use a simple one.

[chadyj]

This is fantastic! I simply created 3 graphs based on email client data featuring a dendogram, circular dendogram, and circular packing. It charts the relationship of OS, device type, email client type, and client name. http://minus.com/m5VsIg2QvP2R3

[TallboyOne]

How did you make that really cool animation on the homepage? I have been attempting to do this myself with javascript setTimeout mixed with css3 animation but its freakin awful, because it's one just massive callback inside a callback. it must be indented like 60 times near the end of my animation.

[paultannenbaum]

To handle the callback pyramid of doom, look into javascript promises.

Another option is using a timeline based tool like Sencha's Animator: http://www.sencha.com/products/animator

[chadyj]

A very high tech animated gif.

[kika]

maybe https://github.com/caolan/async is the answer?

[kfk]

Nice. But the biggest problem of spreadsheets is sharing and organizing data between multiple users, think github for spreadsheets. These visualizations are very good, but they are not a "hair on fire" kind of problem for most of the spreadsheets users.

[zalew]

Nice project, but the name is terrible IMO, in terms of being overly generic and possibly ungooglable - it's painful enough to sort out crap when looking for RAW image troubleshooting.

[zekenie]

Looks really neat! Any plans for more data formats other than csv? Also, service is down... must be all that hn traffic :)

[ksrm]

"Dendogram" should be dendrogram.

[Pinatubo]

Site is down now, so I'll check it out later. Is this kind of a plug-and-play version of d3.js?