Book Image

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Book Image

ActionScript Graphing Cookbook

Overview of this book

"A picture is worth a thousand words" has never been more true than when representing large sets of data. Bar charts, heat maps, cartograms, and many more have become important tools in applications and presentations to quickly give insight into complicated issues.The "ActionScript Graphing Cookbook" shows you how to add your own charts to any ActionScript program. The recipes give step-by-step instructions on how to process the input data, how to create various types of charts and how to make them interactive for even more user engagement.Starting with basic ActionScript knowledge, you will learn how to develop many different types of charts.First learn how to import your data, from Excel, web services and more. Next process the data and make it ready for graphical display. Pick one of the many graph options available as the book guides you through ActionScript's drawing functions. And when you're ready for it, branch out into 3D display.The recipes in the "ActionScript Graphing Cookbook" will gradually introduce you into the world of visualization.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
ActionScript Graphing Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mapping keyboard usage in 3D, part 2: The data


In this recipe, we'll replace the random data that we added to the keyboard object with the actual data taken from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency.

We will only add three languages, but you'll see that you can add as many as you want.

Getting ready

To display a combobox that lets the user pick the language to show, we will use the minimalcomps library. It can be downloaded from https://github.com/minimalcomps/minimalcomps/downloads. This library is, as the name implies, an extremely basic implementation of many graphical components. Due to its simplicity, it is also very easy to use in any ActionScript program.

To use it in your project, download it and place the SWC file in the lib directory of the project. Inside FlashDevelop, right-click on the file and choose Add to library. This will make all the classes inside the file available to your programs.

We'll, of course, continue from the previous recipe.

How to do it...

In the previous...