Friday, December 14, 2007

Flot 0.3 released!

New version of Flot is out. See the changes. This is mostly a bug fix release because the previous zip/tarball didn't contain the jquery.js file.

I've also started a mailing list which I really recommend using.

I did sneak in a new feature - that's why it is 0.3 instead of 0.2.1. You can now enable people to click on the plot and get the (x,y) coordinates (in the unit of the plot, not pixels) out.

This is a primitive form of interaction. Eventually I want to support automatic data coupling so you can know what has been clicked and in the same vein highlight the stuff underneath the cursor. But at the moment I'm pretty swamped with things to do, and this clicking was enough for our internal application. I suspect it will be useful for lots of other things too, at least until Flot is clever enough to map from points to data.

Friday, December 7, 2007

Flot 0.2 released!

I've released a new version of Flot. The API is now documented and legends have a background. And you can get the whole package as a zip/tarball. See the changes.

Lots of people are asking for pie charts. And some people have difficulty seeing the charts in IE 6. Which is really unfortunate because I can't reproduce it myself. All the machines with IE 6 I have access to render them fine. It's probably something silly, but it's going to take a bit of debugging to find it.

My plans for the near future mostly deal with getting proper support for time series and some of the other interactive stuff if I can squeeze it in. And get a forum or mailing list up running.

If you have a public application of Flot online, I'd like to hear about it, I intend to compile a list of real-world examples.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Flot 0.1 released!

We've released the first version of Flot, a new Javascript plot library for jQuery!

It draws on inspiration from Plotr and PlotKit, and several other commercial packages. But also from venerable old gnuplot - there's nothing more boring than hand-picking axis scales so I wanted the default algorithm to be smart.

The project actually got started because we were growing dissatisfied with Plotr which looks nice but is pretty dumb when it comes to auto-detecting stuff and didn't have any interactive features which we needed for a custom web-based business intelligence application.

I find it interesting that I initially thought plotting to be a hard problem - but this project got started a couple of months ago and I've only been hacking on it sporadically. Right now, the library is still missing support for time series, but is otherwise pretty much feature-complete for what we need it to do. I'm looking forward to hearing other people's opinion.