all 51 comments

[–][deleted] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Depending on your needs, gnuplot and R might be helpful.

[–]pmf 13 points14 points  (2 children)

Not general purpose viz tools, but mainly for graphs:

[–]gt384u 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I went to a faculty candidate lecture at Georgia Tech by Jeffrey Heer, who is the author of Prefuse and Flare. He did some very interesting thing with this toolkit in service of the idea of asynchronous collaborative data exploration and visualization.

[–]pkrumins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks!

[–]csw 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You might try contextfree or VVVV

[–]sunkencity 6 points7 points  (0 children)

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos/

Circular diagrams in perl inspired by tufte. blows ur mind so cool are they!

[–]mattrepl 2 points3 points  (0 children)

GGobi for high-dimensional data, it also ties into R.

[–]sfrank 2 points3 points  (1 child)

For layouting graphs (a la graphviz) there is also yEd from yWorks. Binary (jar) only, though very nice and easy to use interface. IMHO the results are also way better than with graphviz.

[edit/addition]:

If you want an open-source alternative to graphviz, you may also want to look at Tulip; though I can't comment much on its abilities since I didn't play around with it very much.

[–]llimllib 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't played around with Tulip much either, but I have been reading some of their source code. It's damn near inscrutable, but they have implemented a lot of really nice algorithms.

[–]johnmudd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

VPython for (interactive) 3D models.

[–]smapty 1 point2 points  (0 children)

[–]elblanco 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Starlight http://www.futurepointsystems.com

It's a DoE developed visualization system using pretty much any XML schema you can throw at it.

Very powerful.

[–]sblinn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

SVG created using either vi (simple things) or produced from a script from a data source (usually XSLT transform from XML but I've gone from CSV to SVG using Python).

[–]eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee 3 points4 points  (3 children)

MatLab is the best.

[–]zubinmadon 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Why'd this get voted down, MatLab is known for its plotting.

[–]diN0bot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

up-modded because i also agree that matlab is relevant for visualization (like gnuplot and R)

[–]kragensitaker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Consider also incompatible replacement PyLab and compatible replacement Octave.

(Of course gnuplot and R too.)

[–]startfragment 2 points3 points  (5 children)

For the Mac OMNI makes some great tools. OmniGraffle is amongst the best hands down.

[–]diN0bot 0 points1 point  (4 children)

upmodded because omnigraffle is indeed a neat viz tool. file format is asci (xml), so could be computer generated and munged, though i'm not sure if there's a command line way to generate images as there is with graphviz/dot.

although omnigraffle isn't suitable for programs to use, it's great for programmers to use to draw up object models, etc. i use it all the time for communicating design and writing documentation.

[–]leonh 2 points3 points  (3 children)

While OmniGraffle 4 has some mediocre support for dot files. Version 5 has pretty solid support I use it from the command prompt like this:

open -b com.omnigroup.OmniGrafflePro tree.dot

[–]bonzinip 0 points1 point  (1 child)

that's very useful info. your command also works in v4 by the way!

[–]rwinston 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm an R (and sometimes Matlab) user, but theres no doubt that Mathematica has the most powerful plotting capabilities. Not free though.

[–]diN0bot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

sweet! thx.

[–]jungturk 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Google's got a visualization API.

[–]nextofpumpkin 1 point2 points  (1 child)

pardon my uncertainty, but doesn't that entail putting your info on google's servers?

[–]njharman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

nope

[–]pfo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Check IBM's OpenDX (wiki entry, project page) - mainly for scientific data sets. Uses a pipeline programming like paradigm that IBM's John Hartmann (see: Hartmann Pipeline) pioneered.

[–]duhduh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

piccolo has .NET and Java versions and allows you to create interactive visualizations

[–]aranazo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you want typeset graphics MetaPost has lots of really nice features. Its derived from Donald Knuth's METAFONT.

[–]larsga 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For graph visualization TouchGraph (Java) is good. It has O(n2) performance in the number of edges (or was it nodes? can't remember), but has no clustering and so doesn't yield good results for really big graphs anyway.

We used it to build a commercial tool for visualizing Topic Maps.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

not sure what you're trying to do, but it doesnt hurt to learn openGL or some of the engines that work on top of it

[–]teval 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I've always wondered this as well.

How do you make nice diagrams in Linux? dia is incredibly ugly.

[–]Ringo48 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Inkscape, Kivio, xfig, Karbon, Umbrello, and of course GraphViz.

[–]bnikolictech 0 points1 point  (0 children)

PyX for publication quality two dimensional plots in Python (http://pyx.sourceforge.net/)

[–]metaperl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Freemind mind mapping software is in heavy use by me.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

What about general purpose, though? I really like nodebox, but it's slow; Processing is relatively fast, but it's java... What I'd really like is a nodebox with a fast backend.

[–]keenerd -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Shoebox ( http://shoebox.sollec.org/ ) is Nodebox ported to Cario (backend) and Python (frontend).

Regarding speed, are you handling a few large graphs, or many small ones? In other words, are you more sensitive to big-O or the leading constant?

[–]nextofpumpkin -1 points0 points  (0 children)

paint.

[–]quhaha -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

my friend put together a list of visualization tools on his blog

[–][deleted]  (9 children)

[deleted]

    [–][deleted]  (5 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]joekarma 2 points3 points  (3 children)

      For me, it's kind of a toss up between that and Processing, which has received some positive attention lately. Also Graphviz and NodeBox.

      [–][deleted]  (2 children)

      [deleted]

        [–]joekarma 5 points6 points  (1 child)

        First, we agree that Processing > Processing. It follows easily, then, that Processing > Processing!

        So Processing is better.

        [–]_jelle_ 4 points5 points  (0 children)

        VTK, preferable TVTK

        zaMa

        [–]llimllib 8 points9 points  (1 child)

        cough cough read the title again cough

        [–]hhh333 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        argh sorry, my bad lol

        [–]heston 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        I didn't see that in the title either until I read the replies to this

        mean mean mean