Ask HN: Should Gridspy avoid Flash? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should Gridspy avoid Flash?

3 pointsgridspy5 comments

As you might know, Gridspy the a power monitoring solution that I am developing. Suffice to say it is totally awesome. Working dashboard here : http://your.gridspy.co.nz/powertech/

Right now, we use the jquery sparkines library : http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/ and some rendered PNGs to show data. The sparklines are JS and render to canvas. All good.

Enter the Google Visualisation library : http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery.html

Now some of these are totally awesome. One in particular grabs my attention: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/annotatedtimeline.html

However : this annotation requires flash. Do I avoid it for that reason? Should I just query the client to see if they have flash and selectively degrade to an alternative (such as http://danvk.org/dygraphs/)?

So, overall, how evil is Flash in your opinion?

If it's significantly faster to do what you want in Flash, do it that way first. Your users are almost certain to have it.

Most of the conversations of the evilness of flash are limited to the HN sort of audience. I don't think that the internet audience at large really cares about it all that much.

If the features end up being really useful and you decide you hate Flash, you can revisit it and write it in something else later.

If the features end up not getting used, then you saved yourself a bunch of time on a feature that didn't end up being a big deal.

I recently opted to swap jqplot for google vis for some reporting functionality. Losing the annotated timeline was painful, but I think, in the end, workable (jqplot can link the zoom together on two charts so that one of them is the thumbnail).

Flash was part of the reason I switched; I was not wholly comfortable with [what I perceive as] the fragile and convoluted page load dependency between google vis and jquery (perhaps you have a better way).

jqplot looks great. Thanks for the suggestion!

Hot :

Dashboard: http://your.gridspy.co.nz/powertech/

Jquery sparklines: http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/

Google visualisation: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall...

Annotated timeline (the flash one): http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall... <-- Should I use this?

DyGraphs: http://danvk.org/dygraphs

I don't think flash is "evil", but as I often am browsing around on my iphone, a nicely degrading site is a godsend. This seems like the type of site someone might add to their home screen and check periodically.

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