[wdmmg-discuss] Budgetiser...

[Tony Hirst]

So after seeing Rufux, albeit briefly, earlier this week, i'm now feeling
suitably guilty about not having been keeping up with how much stuff you've
been managing to do around wdmmg...

Looking through the last few days msgs, and having a quick look at the
budgetizer [ http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/budget/budgetizer/ ] things that
came to my mind were:

- it seems to use google spreadsheets gdata list api rather than eg
visualisation query language (
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/querylanguage.html )
which is the one I've played with in the past. (Though looking at data api
that's the one I guess Google support most heavily?). Is the google
spreadsheets data api the "preferred" api for getting data out of google
spreadsheets in anger? (Also, are you programmatically putting data into goog
spreadsheets via the api, or uisng the UI to upload/paste in data? I think you
can do more to structure data, eg defining logical tables (
http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#CreatingTableRecords
) if data is submitted via the api. )

- have you looked at google fusion tables at all? Again, there's an api (
http://code.google.com/apis/fusiontables/docs/developers_guide.html ) but other
advantages include:
- bigger tables;
- ability to merge datasets and essentially "join" subsets of data from
separate tables via a UI, as well as provision of interactive visuliastion
tools within that environment.

What I've been mulling over lately is different sorts of users/ability to
engage. So for example, budgetizer has interactive charts for an end user, but
what about the step before that? eg suppose i am the person who has a big data
set and is looking for the best ways of visualising it? Creating charts in
google spreadsheets is one way for me to do that - visually playing with the
data looking for the best representation that could then be used in a
budgetizer like UI, but the interactive chart creation tools in Google Fusion
tables is maybe even easier?

tony

PS apologies if this has been discussed before, or is wildly off topic... I
will try to keep up from now on... ;-)

PPS on the budgetizer UI, in chrome on a mac, unticking checkbox selectors for
graph type doesn't seem to undraw the corresponding graphs?

-----------------------------------------------------------
Tony Hirst
mailto:a.j.hirst at open.ac.uk
blog: http://ouseful.info
twitter: @psychemedia

Dept. of Communication & Systems,
The Open University, Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK

Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07771 330 372

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