In a nod to making useful visualizations, the marker infrastructure has been beefed up. The linear mapper now has reasonable heuristics to use pretty round numbers. And the time mapper has all sorts of time ranges under its belt.

While I have thoughtfully left out units, there is now at least a chance of someone guessing that the above is a graph of the high, average, and low temperatures for somewhere in some year. Maybe someone really fancy could narrow it down by figuring out when the various inconsistent holidays fall and the overall temperature trends. But I’ll spoil the fun; it’s Dulles, VA in 2006! Thanks to a CF6 ‘Preliminary Climatology Data’ parser/’data feed’ we have a limitless* source of data which is only good for examples. Also, thank you weather.gov.

This one is just the month of June. The non-intuitive numbers are ISO weeks. Overkill demands the ‘rulers’ that provide the date ranges eventually be capable of visualizing data themselves**, but for now they just derive their colors from primitive theming support which is also new.

I should probably note that I have begun to push my bzr repository to this server (/rev_control/bzr/visophyte) simply because I can’t think of a reason not to. The visophyte code proper is LGPL v3, but examples are MIT/X11 (though they need to be more explicitly labelled as such). That said, the code is still in an aggressive state of flux and I suggest no one even bother looking at it. Simply put, I keep adding features as needed, and the waves of non-backwards-compatible constraint/feature propagation often need to ripple through the entire codebase. And when I say ripple, I mean ripple; it’s not instantaneous.

* For the purposes of this asterisk, limitless still involves limited cutting and pasting. The parser likes to read files, not interwebs.

** Although I am likely to use such functionality to render the rulers useless and somewhat gaudy, there are sane possibilities too.