Building a mobile agenda for JSConf

[Update: Sorry for the missing pics... Deleted by accident. Thank you google...]

A couple of OutSystems' engineering guys were going to a JSConf Europe conference this weekend. While looking for the schedule, they found this:

 

We just couldn't let this opportunity go by, so João Neves used Platform 9 (which is about to be released) to build an agenda for the event. You can find the application here. It gets the Agenda from google docs using the new REST capabilities, and it is a completely mobile ready!

And, since on the week before I was playing with the source code of OutSystems Now, I built an application for Android that would allow attendees to view the schedule of the conference on their devices, even if offline (source code here).

The results were pretty cool! At the time of writing, 125 people had installed the Android App and we a bit over 7.500 pageviews! And we had some good reviews! :)

    

Star Wars stop motion

Some fun with the kids, using discount animation software (the movie is in Portuguese...):


If you're curious, we used iStopMotion to record the video using an iPad camera, ToonBoom to add the lasers, QuickTime to record the sound, and iMovie to assemble everything. Extra videos and sounds downloaded from the internet.

Displaying discrete data in R

Suppose you have a restaurant, and you do a survey where your customers can grade from 1 to 5 several aspects of that restaurant. The 1st 5 lines on your data will look something like:

	Food	Drinks	Location	Service
1	4	2	5	5
2	4	3	5	4
3	5	4	5	4
4	3	3	5	4
5	4	2	5	3

To analise this data, what I would usually do is check the mean, standard deviation, maybe do some histograms, and maybe do a boxplot of the data.

But when you have small amounts of data, these approaches tend to hide the story. An alternative option is to use a beeswarm chart:

This type of chart shows the entire dataset, allowing you to see everything at a glance!

If you're using R, you can create these charts using the beeswarm package. You can find the code that built this chart here (it also uses the reshape package).