 |
Slick, Libre Charts?
Either there is no great, simple application for well-designed charts and numeric diagrams on OS X, or it's amazingly well hidden -- all I want to do is transform tables of numbers (and text labels) into beautiful visualizations. Like in Excel, only good-looking. I don't even care about the output format. Keynote only works for small data sets, and all free/open source applications I've looked into suck (examples).
As an alternative I thought about scripting Inkscape, but haven't yet looked into it. Gruff on the other hand is often too limited for what I want to do, but it already comes close (even if it's only a Ruby code library, not an application). I then briefly thought about looking into Python scripting, as those guys seem to have some great visualization toolkits. But my imaginary best solution: someone should develop something simple with the SM2DGraphView framework, select better color schemes, add antialiased drawing routines and make it open source.
(Update: in the comments ZeroK points me to R and R.app -- after some time of getting acquainted with the system it seems like the way to go. I'm actually surprised: yeah it's a geeky open source scripting environment, and I'll have to develop my own designs, but who doesn't love scripting languages and flexibility. And most importantly: The integration of R.app with OS X works great -- first time I've used PDF as file format for vector graphs, and Pages seems to like it.)
Low-level WiFi debugger?
Totally unrelated to that I'm also looking for a simple WiFi console/diagnosis application that lets you watch the raw 802.11 protocol flow -- I'm regularly having problems with connecting to other people's wireless networks, sometimes even my own, and a debugging tool often helps. (Don't suggest tcpdump, this happens on an even lower level.) There are some wardriving tools for Linux that could be abused for this, but nothing seems to be ported to OS X yet. Damn you Apple and your closed-source hardware drivers...
Comments
Have you already tried R? IMO together with gnuplot it's the best tool for statistical visualization. Sure, both need a little bit time to getting used to, but they are well worth it :)
http://www.r-project.org/
http://www.gnuplot.info/
zeroK, 2006-02-17 12:09 CET (+0100) Link
Well I did briefly look at their screenshots, and was initially turned off by several superficial things -- e.g. the fact that R doesn't seem to do have antialiased drawing routines. Or the fact that it might take a lot of work to do something in gnuplot/R and make it look as nice as a Keynote graph (do either of them even support native OS X fonts?) They're both scientific applications, which usually doesn't rhyme with my sense of aestetics...
But in the end I should probably get off my high horse, stop complaining and start using either of them.
R looks nice.
Martin Dittus, 2006-02-17 20:28 CET (+0100) Link
Yes, seems like the X11 device doesn't really offer anything antialiased, but there is a (not perfect but at least for me practicable) workaround. If you're using R.app instead of the terminal application or use the quartz() device, the rendered image seems to be antialiased. You can then select that window and use edit->copy to put the plot into the clipboard for postprocessing :D
zeroK, 2006-02-18 00:26 CET (+0100) Link
Ah, thx
Martin Dittus, 2006-02-18 03:39 CET (+0100) Link
David N. writes in to say that http://www.scipy.org/ uses the Anti-Grain Geometry library from http://www.antigrain.com/ -- which looks like a first-class 2D imaging library.
Martin Dittus, 2006-03-03 08:06 CET (+0100) Link
By pure coincidence I found an "Ask Edward Tufte" thread with recommendations for commercial graphing software. A bit offtopic, but may be interesting nevertheless.
-> http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00000p
Martin Dittus, 2006-07-08 18:36 CET (+0100) Link
Comments are closed. You can contact me instead.