The Crazy-Cool Box-olin Chart
David Mogrovejo’s work is so creative we haven’t managed to name it yet.
Last week we completed our first Modathon, a hackathon for visual analytics Spotfire Mods. Mods are popular in the gaming community, where developers can modify gaming engines with their own characters, worlds, and behaviors via a simple programming framework. We borrowed this idea and applied it to visual analytics.
Like gaming Mods, Spotfire Mods unlock the creativity of developers.
David Mogrovejo’s Mod was a winning submission. It’s so clever the judges are still scratching their heads about what to call it. David combined a Box Chart, a Violin Chart, and custom controls to produce something we hadn’t seen before.
Watch me try to explain David’s Box-olin Mod below. It uses Avocado sales data in the United States to reveal trends in sales data. As Ben Schneiderman told our conference attendees yesterday, great visual analytics gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had. It’s the thrill of discovery. David’s Mod does just that.
We’re excited to see this creativity flourish. With this brilliant framework, it’s like we’ve added millions of developers to the BI engineering team. David’s hard-to-name innovation, the Box-olin, is a fantastic example of that innovation at work. Congratulations, David!
And there’s just one more thing: The real magic happens when non-developers--analysts and business users--use Mods to explore information in new ways. Installing Mods is as simple as installing apps from an app store. Go to www.tibco.com/mods to check them out, and stay tuned for the Box-olin submission to appear!
