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Posts Tagged ‘trulia’

Trulia Hindsight - Processing Prototypes

In Processing, Weblog on 31 May 2007 tagged Animations, information_visualisation, movies, Processing, real-estate, stamen, trulia, vimeo, Weblog, Work with no comments

A few people have asked if I'm still using Processing now that I've joined Stamen (best known for their Flash work). Whilst it's true that I've been quiet on the Processing front, hard at work learning Actionscript 3 for Flash 9 to enable us to deliver Trulia Hindsight, much of that piece was informed by early sketches I wrote in Processing. (The graphs we made of a day of diggs were also made with Processing.)

Here are four movies we made from Trulia's data to get across the ideas we wanted to develop into Hindsight. It's a lucky thing that Flash 9 can shift many more points around the screen than Flash 8, otherwise we'd have been stuck. That said, it's still way behind Processing with OpenGL for this kind of visualisation, so choose your tools wisely when building a proof-of-concept in a different language to the one your project will be delivered in!

In the first few weeks of working with Trulia, we did some initial work exploring non-geographic views of their data such as tree maps and node graphs and so on. In the end though, the most compelling thing we came up with was to explore the different dimensions of the Trulia database in the form of animated maps.

Here are two movies, the first is San Francisco and the second is San Jose, showing the properties animated along an intuitive axis: the year they were built.

San Francisco by Year (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

San Jose by Year (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

And here are two more movies, also made with Processing, that show the properties that were sold in the last 10 years (under $2m), this time animated by sale price:

San Francisco by Price (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

San Jose by Price (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo

The animations by sale price aren't available in Trulia Hindsight (yet) but we hope to work more on these less-intuitive dimensions for animation in the future.

No doubt whichever direction we go in next I'll still reach for Processing to try things out. It's the tool I find it easiest to think in, and although Flex Builder (based on Eclipse) is a great IDE, I still find myself wanting to bend Actionscript to be more like Processing when it comes to prototyping my ideas - it seems I'm not the only one!

What I’ve been working on at Stamen: Trulia Hindsight

In Weblog on 30 May 2007 tagged conferences, Maps, san-jose, stamen, trulia, where2.0, Work with no comments

I'm just back from the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose where Shawn and I tumbled through a 15 minute summary of Stamen and our last few months of work: starting with Mappr, MoveOn and Cabspotting, through Mike's Oakland Crime visualisations, leading to Modest Maps, INdigital telecom and finally launching Trulia Hindsight:

Trulia Hindsight is the first project I've worked on from beginning to end at Stamen, and it's been a lot of fun. We developed the initial concepts as a group and then the ideas were fleshed out by me under Eric's guidance and with design input from Geraldine Sarmiento - thanks Geraldine!

We've got an initial write-up on the Stamen site, and Trulia's take on things is here. Hopefully we can get a chance to post some of the initial experiments that went into the piece and talk about some of the things we're proud of soon. For the moment though, it's time to breathe out and see what people think!