Friday, October 23, 2009

Flot 0.6 released!

I just released Flot 0.6! Highlights are a new plugin system, or at least the beginnings of it, lots of new features (most of them in plugins) and bug fixes, including fixes for IE 8. Check out the complete list of changes. Note that there are some API changes.

There were still some things I would have liked to do before the release, but it has been dragging along for far too long.

Otherwise the future is looking bright. The plugin system is not complete yet, but I think the general direction is OK, and will allow third parties to extend Flot considerably without going through me.

On the technological front, canvas support is gaining traction in the browsers and even support for what used to be advanced stuff like text rendering and export to image is getting more common place. I suspect we will soon have to think hard about whether to continue with the current labels-are-HTML approach or switch to rendering them directly on the canvas.

Completely unrelated to Flot: I haven't blogged for some time. It's entirely due to lack of time, I have been preoccupied, or gone crazy is probably closer to the truth, with another hobby project which is still some effort away from being useful.