Find familiar places in new cities

If you’re traveling to a new city, it can be tricky to figure out where things are and what the places are like. However, if you had a tool that set the context of the new city in terms of the neighborhoods in a city you know, you might get a better feel for the new city. Raymond Kennedy made an app (that appears to rely heavily on the OpenAI API) that lets you search the unfamiliar city against the familiar. [via Waxy]

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Psuedo-charts with Microsoft Image Creator

With each new AI-based tool that comes out, I begrudgingly kick the tires to see what kind of charts it spits out. I need to know when it’s time to hang the old data boots and switch careers. My most recent test subject: Microsoft Image Creator, which is powered by the text-to-image model DALL-E 3. These are “beautiful” charts through the lens of the model.

These are fine, I guess. Obviously they don’t show any real data yet. Maybe my queries need to be more specific, but these mostly feel like charts that were made to accommodate every data choice and angle instead of narrowing down to something useful.

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Turn a static SVG into an interactive one, with Flourish

It’s straightforward to share a static SVG online, but maybe you want tooltips or for elements to highlight when you hover over them. Flourish has a new template to provide the interactions easier. Seems promising.

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Color palette generator

In the never-ending quest to find the perfect color scheme for any given situation at any given moment, Coolors is another set of tools to find the right shades for your application. The twist is that there’s a generator that shows you schemes based on inputs, such as a certain hue or a photograph. There is also a list of trending palettes.

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A color tool for accessible schemes

Leonardo is an open source project from Adobe that helps you pick accessible colors. There’s a JavaScript API along with a browser tool that lets you select colors interactively.

Color is a common encoding to visualize data. It can be used directly in choropleth maps or heatmaps, indirectly as a redundant encoding, it can be decorative, and it can be used for all the things in between. However, a color scheme doesn’t work if a big chunk of your audience is not able to see the differences. So it’s good to see these sorts of tools available.

Leonardo is an extension of Chroma.js. Gregor’s Chroma.js palette helper is still my go-to to keep color schemes in check.

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Seeing just the questions

As a way to explore how people use questions in their writing, a straightforward tool by Clive Thompson lets you see all the questions in a body of text. Just copy and paste and you’re set. The above are the questions from George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”.

Try it out here.

See also Thompson’s related tool that shows only the punctuation.

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Weather Strip, an app that shows the forecast as a time series

Weather Strip is a new weather app by visualization researcher Robin Stewart. It shows the week’s forecast as a time series chart, aiming to show you details at a glance. The temperature shows as a line chart, and a stacked area chart that represents weather conditions serves as background.

You’d think it’d hit all the right notes for me, but I’m more of a bare minimum type when it comes to weather forecasts. Just a table of highs, lows, and chance of rain is all I need. People seem to be into this view though, so maybe you’ll enjoy this more than me.

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Find a color palette based on words

PhotoChrome is a straightforward tool that lets you use search terms to find a color palette. Just enter a query, and it spits out a color scheme of hex values based on matching images.

It’s like Picular from a few years ago but more focused with a copy-paste.

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RAWGraphs 2.0, an open-source tool to visualize data

RAWGraphs, a tool conceived by DensityDesign in 2013, got a 2.0 update in a collaborative effort between DensityDesign, Calibro and Inmagik:

RAW Graphs is an open source data visualization framework built with the goal of making the visual representation of complex data easy for everyone.

Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAW Graphs aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenRefine) and vector graphics editors (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch).

Load your dataset, and make a wide range of charts with the point-and-click interface. The options try to update smartly depending on your data and visualization choices.

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Sim Daltonism, an intuitive app that simulates color blindness

When we visualize data to communicate to others, we must consider what others see through their eyes. Sim Daltonism by Michel Fortin is a free app for the Mac that lets you see how those with various types of color blindness perceive what’s on your computer screen.

It’s simple to use. Just drag a window over any part of your screen to see the differences.

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