Nathan's tutorial on using Flare for something like the JobVoyager was a real eye-opener for me, didn't realize that there were tools available to make interactive visualization so easy.
I whipped something up real fast ( http://staff.washington.edu/kfor/USCoD.swf ), and now I'm hooked. But before I devote too much time to learning a new language, I want to make sure I've picked the 'right' one.
Flare is of course beautiful, and has a lot of pre-written code specifically for visualizing data that I can borrow from. But it seems to be dead development wise and there don't seem to be any new resources popping up for it.
Processing looks like it's easier to learn, but it requires a Java applet which limits who will use it. And there doesn't seem to be as much code that I can just adapt to my own needs, as most of the stuff I've seen is more artistic than data-driven. But it certainly seems to have a more active user community than Flare.
I eventually want to create something like the cause of death voyager I posted above, but with the ability to select any country, have inset graphs that show the age pattern of a disease when you hover over the main graph, allow for pulling up multiple countries for comparison, etc. Does anyone have suggestions for which would be the best language for me to learn over Christmas? Also, any links to tutorials or other resources to get started would be great!
Thanks
Kyle
