Mostly I've been trying to work out some new visuals to display energy savings information. So graphs. The product people come up with the actual design ideas, but I've got to make the picture into an interactive page. I was pointed towards the awesome D3 graphing library by Adam but it's not compatible with IE before version 9, which we can't accept. Too bad, because D3 looks great.
Instead I've been poking at the Raphaël graphics library. It's really easy to work in and I recommend looking at it. The internet has come a long, long way since I last poked at it back in high school.
The neatest thing of it all is poking at graphics. Like, graphic stuff independent of whatever language you're in. In one of the rare cases of me actually finding something I don't know the name of, I started looking into some circle packing algorithms. While there is a JavaScript libray called moocirclepack, I think I'll pre-compute the packing on the server if we decide to use the visual.
Am currently looking into fitting a nice curve to some data points, which has me reading up on Bézier curves. The program people just started talking to a User Experience? Interaction? contractor today so hopefully they'll have even more interesting requests for me to implement.
Over dinner tonight, both Adam and I agreed Javascript is a pretty sweet language. It's the nicest untyped one I've experienced so far... it's so damn easy to work in!
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