Failing Forward

If you’ve ever used Google Finance, you’ve probably been impressed by their date slider interface.  While working on a metrics dashboard recently, I thought it would be great if I could use a similar interface for user activity over a given time.  Searching around on Google got me no where fast, so I decided I would combine a jQuery Slider with the Google Chart API and use Ajax to emulate the Google Finance date slider UI.

Four days later, I found a link to the Google Visualization API.  Specifically, to their Annotated Time Line.  Simultaneously frustrated that I hadn’t found it a week sooner and relieved that I had found it after all, I was quickly able to implement the API for my needs.

The Annotated Time Line (and I assume the other Google Visualization APIs as well) are all Flash objects. You create, configure, and pass data to the Flash objects in JavaScript, and then draw the object (this is great because no excess data needs to be sent over the wire – it’s all done on the client side).

I would highly recommend perusing the Google Visualization API – you might well find some useful code there.