Apps
4 posts
Leonardo is an open source project from Adobe that helps you pick accessible colors. There’s a JavaScript API along with a browser tool that lets you select colors interactively. Color is a common encoding to visualize data. It can be used directly in choropleth maps or heatmaps, indirectly as a redundant encoding, it can be decorative, and it can be used for all the things in between. However, a color...
As a way to explore how people use questions in their writing, a straightforward tool by Clive Thompson lets you see all the questions in a body of text. Just copy and paste and you’re set. The above are the questions from George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”. Try it out here. See also Thompson’s related tool that shows only the punctuation. Tags: Clive Thompson, questions, writing
Weather Strip is a new weather app by visualization researcher Robin Stewart. It shows the week’s forecast as a time series chart, aiming to show you details at a glance. The temperature shows as a line chart, and a stacked area chart that represents weather conditions serves as background. You’d think it’d hit all the right notes for me, but I’m more of a bare minimum type when it comes...
PhotoChrome is a straightforward tool that lets you use search terms to find a color palette. Just enter a query, and it spits out a color scheme of hex values based on matching images. It’s like Picular from a few years ago but more focused with a copy-paste. Tags: color, images, words
RAWGraphs, a tool conceived by DensityDesign in 2013, got a 2.0 update in a collaborative effort between DensityDesign, Calibro and Inmagik: RAW Graphs is an open source data visualization framework built with the goal of making the visual representation of complex data easy for everyone. Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAW Graphs aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple...
When we visualize data to communicate to others, we must consider what others see through their eyes. Sim Daltonism by Michel Fortin is a free app for the Mac that lets you see how those with various types of color blindness perceive what’s on your computer screen. It’s simple to use. Just drag a window over any part of your screen to see the differences. Tags: colorblind
Companies are tracking what you do online. You know this. But it can be a challenge to know the extent, because the methods are hidden on purpose. So The Markup built Blacklight: To investigate the pervasiveness of online tracking, The Markup spent 18 months building a one-of-a-kind free public tool that can be used to inspect websites for potential privacy violations in real time. Blacklight reveals the trackers loading on...
Maddy Varner reporting for The Markup: “All protesting and all marches are a series of balancing acts of different priorities and acceptable risks,” said Mason Donahue, a member of Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago-based group of technologists and activists that run digital security training classes and have investigated the Chicago Police Department’s use of surveillance technology. “There is a lot of communication ability that goes away if you don’t bring...
Brian Foo is the current Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress. His latest project is Citizen DJ, which lets you explore and remix audio from the Library: It invites the public to make hip hop music using the Library’s public audio and moving image collections. By embedding these materials in hip hop music, listeners can discover items in the Library’s vast collections that they likely would never have known existed....
Botnet is a social media app where you’re the only human among a million bots trained on social media activity. Post pictures, status updates, or whatever else you want. Then let the likes and weird comments roll in. You can even purchase troll bots, bots that tell dad jokes, and more bots. Social media is on its way to mostly being bots anyways. Might as well jumpstart the future. Artificial...