This extremely lightweight JavaScript image gallery and slideshow script clocks in under 3kb packed and includes a number of cool features. Recently I was looking for a nice existing script for a client project. I wanted something elegant, simple and lightweight. What I found were a number of scripts built on JavaScript frameworks and a few others that really lacked any appealing interface or were over 30kb. I challenged myself to build a full-featured slideshow gallery under 4kb. Hopefully I will be add a few more features to the script soon and make it a little mode user-friendly.

Website: http://www.leigeber.com/2008/05/ajax-image-gallery-slideshow/

“In this visualization each country is represented by a circle that shows the amount of money spent on the military (size of circle) and what fraction of the country’s earnings that uses (colour). In this graphic the data is presented as ellipses on a cylindrical projection. The countries are not named, and the scaling is slightly different, but once you see africa (central collection of small dots) the layout is clear. The usa dominates the upper/left third of the map.”Visit the website

Adobe Flash Player 10, code-named “Astro,” introduces new expressive features and visual performance improvements that allow interactive designers and developers to build the richest and most immersive Web experiences. These new capabilities also empower the community to extend Flash Player and to take creativity and interactivity to a new level.

Website: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Astro

John Resig has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element. If you’re into visualizations this is a must have. It took him 7 months to complete, but I for one am very thankful he took the time. I’ve wanted this functionality myself for some time. Thanks John!

Website: http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit that was based on 5 papers regarding different information visualization techniques. The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to lay Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

Website: http://blog.thejit.org/?page_id=14

Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) continues to raise user expectations for interactivity and performance, and developers are increasingly treating Ajax as a must-have component of their Web applications. As more code is moved client side and the network model changes, the community is responding by building more tools to address the unique performance challenges of Ajax. Examine toolsets that find and correct performance problems within your Ajax-enriched applications.

Website: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj-perform/?ca=dgr-lnxw01FasterAjax

“This is a New York Times data visualization of all of the categories and prices that make up the U.S. Governments inflation numbers. As they say, “Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers 84,000 prices in about 200 categories — like gasoline, bananas, dresses and garbage collection — to form the Consumer Price Index, one measure of inflation.” I found some very compelling data here. Such as the high price of oil is a large factor in rising food prices. The page is worth checking out.”Visit the website

San Francisco is a very windy city. Because I live here I’m always very curious about the wind patterns. Now because of Francis Ludwig along with some code provided by Nick Thompson I have a way to visualize this. As Francis states, “This new visualization scheme was devloped independently by Nick Thompson who has kindly allowed us use of it. While this may initialy appear to be a time-series animation it is instead a dynamic rendering of particle streaklines. Rather than evolving through time the animation is describing the flow of the wind at a given time.””

I spend most of my days and nights in front of the computer screen. Needless to say I listen to countless hours of music. I’m always looking for new music to listen to, and face it, iTunes can only get you so far with it’s rather limited discovery features. Recently, I’ve turned to relational, and visual music discovery engines to find more tunes that related to my current musical tastes. “The basic premiss behind this new breed of music search is that you start by entering a genre, artist, song, or geo-location, and you are returned music that relates to your search term. In most cases the returns are presented as a visualization in order to show the connections between data.”Below you find a list of the sites that I go to when I’m trying to find new music. If …

“The idea of the the social graph was written about by Brad Fitzpatrick where he defined it as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related”. This is what TweetWheel does for Twitter. It shows you all of your friends and how they’re connected to each other. The load is a bit slow, however, it’s worth the wait. Nice job to the developers.”Visit the website