nuzzaci - an online journal

I just peeled 7 lemons for our home made limoncello. Something I wished I could do every sunday evening. If you have some spare 95% alcohol at home I suggest you go over to Willow’s ‘how to make limoncello’ guide and make yourself some, too. It’s magic.

So. It has taken a while, but I’ve finally got around to purchasing an iPhone. I’m sure a lot of my Swedish friends are more surprised that I didn’t have one than the fact that I’ve just got one. I remember how people thought I was a nut-case when I bought my first iPod back in 2002, and most of those people today are more of a apple-nutcase than I am!

Well, I’m afraid to say that the iPhone is exactly as good as it’s set out to be. It’s a paradigm shift in how people will consume mobile devices; be it mobile phones, PDA’s or computers. And, I wouldn’t be surprised if we will soon have some new companies poping up and again, smashing the “giants” (Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG) on their heads.

The way I see it; Apple haven’t done as good a job as the giants have done a bad one. The future in this area will be interesting for the consumer and bumpy for the established brand; a playground for app developers, online services, entrepreneurs and game developers.

For now, the stage belongs to Apple.

This past weekend, besides going for a stroll and trying Gustav’s long distance ice skates, I looked into how to go about drawing dynamic websites graphs.

I found 4 candidates. None of them being absolutely perfect for my liking. I was thinking something along the line of W3C’s Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). What I found was mainly Adobe Flash tools or different solutions requiring javascript libraries.

From W3C’s standard approach to a Flash-based solution was a bit of a big leap. I can deal with javascript libraries, but my preferred library is Mootools and I couldn’t find one that uses Mootools. So, feel free to post comments if you know of anything better, mightier and nicer than the four listed below.

1. Plotkit. Plotkit looks extremely nice. My only reservation is that it used the Mochikit javascript library. I haven’t investigated much or played with Mochikit.

2. Flotr. Flotr is an adaptation on Plotkit — or inspired by — but unlike Plotkit it uses Prototype Javascript Framework.

3. Flot. Flot uses Jquery as it’s javascript library. I have worked with Jquery before so I ended up giving it a go. But i’m not completely convinced and will probably give both Plotkit and Flotr a go too.

4. Google Chart. Unlike the above option (or any other I found), Google requires no additional library or plug-in to be installed. The Google Chart API simply returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. So you basically just build up some parameters in a IMG tag and in return Google gives you an image. It’s extremely easy but comes with restrictions. Example of a Google Chart:

Overall i’m impressed with all of them. It’s quite fascinating how easy they make if for you. But, as mentioned, I don’t think I’ve found the holy grail for dynamic graphs.

Yet another perk of not living in the middle of the city; a 15 minutes picturesque walk and you can go long distance ice skating.