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

Introduction


Now that we know how to draw graphs, it's time to look at one of ActionScript's strengths: interacting with the user. In this chapter, we'll see many ways you can give the user control over the graph.

You will notice that this is only a starting point. There are so many options and so many ways to interact with a graph, it would be impossible to describe them all. An application such as Google Maps demonstrates many of the different ways:

  • Drag the graph to show parts that are not displayed

  • Zoom in and out to show details or the overview

  • Hover over markers to show more information

  • Click and select markers to perform actions

  • Display different versions of the same data (also called overlays in many applications)

With the recipes in this chapter, we want to give you a great start and encourage you to experiment.