Do your Apps win Michelin Stars? Do they need to?

Back in 2012, at the TED@SXSWi event in Austin, Texas, JP Rangaswami, then Chief Scientist at SalesForce, now Chief Data Officer at Deutsche Bank, challenged us to consider that information is food.  It is an interesting analogy. I especially liked the "Supersize Me" suggestion of having to watch Fox News for 30 days.

So, if information was food - what would you do differently?

If information was food, what kind of data visualization would you like to see?

Would you be happy with the daily stodge? Not too pretty to look at, and you are not 100% sure of where the ingredients come from (and you have only been ill a few times!). Perhaps of the variety sold to the residents of Ankh-Morpork by CMOT Dibbler?

Or would you be looking for the time-consuming, detail-attentive, incredibly beautiful and incredibly expensive, Michelin starred fare?

Or is it somewhere inbetween?

The reality is, boringly, that it doesn't matter how pretty nor how ugly the presentation layer is if the ingredients are suspect. As I said in a post last year, good governance prevents people from getting food poisoning.

The first step is to get the ingredients right (or as right as we possibly can!) - then we can focus on the presentation. And focus we must. A plate of great ingredients just mashed together will not encourage our diners to return. We mush present our ingredients as best we can with the tools that we have available and then the foodies will keep coming back.

You never know, one day there may be a Michelin judge with them.

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Stephen Redmond is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
He is CTO of CapricornVentis a Qlik Elite Partner.
 

Segment color in pie chart

QlikView 11.2 SR10 includes one new feature change:

"Now possible to define color of the lines around the sectors in a Pie chart. In the properties Color tab of the chart, you can now find the Sector outline property. Please note that calculated colors do not work for this setting."

I know what you are thinking - "Yay!  Sector outline!"

Ok, ok, I know it is not the most fabulous thing to happen to QlikView since it was created, but it does help me with one area: Pie-Gauges.

When I first proposed the Pie-Gauge, it was difficult to get it looking really nice with the native Pie control:

For me, the black outlines detracted from the visualization.  So much so, that I ended up creating an extension object to do the job!

This new change in SR10 means that I can make one properties change, and the same visualization now looks way better.

We could argue for hours about whether this is more or less effective than the same gauge, but it is nice to see new features like this creep into the product.

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Stephen Redmond is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
He is CTO of CapricornVentis a Qlik Elite Partner.