Microsoft open sources SandDance, a visual data exploration tool
cloudblogs.microsoft.com
cloudblogs.microsoft.com
Love that it’s a VS Code extension (and apparently has been for 6 months, shows how in the loop I am) — this looks super slick.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on this team, as evidenced by the fact that I missed this news (ironically, part of my job is producing a weekly developer news video show — clearly I just missed this).
It's a very neat idea. The way I think of the core idea is that you give instructions to all of your rows, and they arrange themselves in a way that high level patterns become visible. That way you can always see the forest and the trees. This is opposed to the current practice of generating new marks from functions on the data to then see high level patterns. In the current practice you can see the forest or the trees.
A very interesting thing happened to me though when I played with this pattern for a while (and this is anecdotal, so take with a grain of salt): it seemed to damage my eyes. I would click around changing the views and the dots would jump in all sorts of directions to the new layouts, and after a while I got headaches and visual aura. Now, it was probably just a coincidence because I was also a bit overworked at the time, but because it was so new, and in some ways so unnatural (to see so many patterns of movement so quickly that you don't generally see in nature), I decided not to take chances and moved away from animated visualizations. Anyone else ever had anything similar happen?
I suppose the animations are there just for show. Just like iPhone's parallax effect which I find odd whenever I notice it.
PS: I assume you ruled out photosensitive epilepsy or something serious.
[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=msrvida....
Reminds me of the Vega project [1] which never really got as much popularity as it should have.
Hillview is a lot less fancy at this point, but the ambition is that it scales a lot better (that is, to way more than 500K rows. In the order of trillions).
Paper here: http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol12/p1442-budiu.pdf
The HN mod DG built something pretty awesome back in 2009 called SkySheet, perhaps if he's reading he'll let us know what the limits of SkySheet were back then?
If you haven't seen it, SandDance is a graphing component where the elements of the graph (like the bars in a bar chart) are made up of individual boxes representing all the rows in the actual data. So in a bar chart, you can highlight part of the bar and see the exact data point it came from.
I appreciate MS releasing it and it is a nice representation for some types of interactive visualizations. But since it is a "modern" tool written as a jumble of web views, javascript and React, it isn't exactly the most performant thing.
This seems to be a similar tool, but for charting non-geographic datasets. It should also be extremely useful.
I am glad companies are making these tools available for the masses.
This is worded poorly; at first I thought it meant React Native. I can only tell that's not what it means because "native JavaScript", despite being a weird term, wouldn't refer to that.
That is most impressive. Their online demo[1] has about 25K rows.
Of course thinking about it, it makes complete sense but I was genuinely surprised at first.
Either way...nice one MS
Also, this is a free and now open source tool from Microsoft Research that is independent of PowerBI.
I don't see how a free open-source visualization library is going to harm these companies, if anything it should help new startups with their own products.