Thursday, June 24, 2010

Very Cool Charts in Smallworld

Ever tried showing pie charts in Magik? Or bar charts or scatter plots? Then tried to label the data points? And create a matching chart legend? Technically, it is all possible in Magik, but the code to manage all that could be quite complex.

Check out this post (http://bit.ly/crW52x) about how Graham at iFactor Consulting has written a Magik interface to the Google Charts API. The possibilities are endless for various kinds of dashboard applications directly in Magik. And I think the charts are also clickable (ie you can drill down on data points). But you might want to ask Graham for more details.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Configuring FME to Write Multiple Datasets More Efficiently

This post by the FME Evangelist describes how to configure your Workspace so that a minimum number of features are cached in memory. The less amount of caching, the more efficient your workspace. This applies to any workspace that has more than one writer (aka destination) dataset in it. Always put the dataset that has the potential to contain the most features to the top of the writer list.

The post gives a more detailed description.

Weather Radar Layer in Smallworld

iFactor Consulting now has a service that allows you to see the current NOAA Weather Radar layer as an overlay on your Smallworld map (see the post here). The service is integrated with Smallworld using the Web Maps Connector.

Clearly NOAA data applies only to data in the USA, but it seems like it wouldn't take much more effort to integrate weather layers from other regions.

(Disclosure: I am happily employed by iFactor Consulting so this isn't a completely unbiased post)

PS. If you are a Web Maps Connector user you can also get updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wmcreleases