

Beautiful and simple sparklines with source code - rantfoil
http://vccv.posterous.com/playing-with-sparklines

======
aw3c2
Terrible examples. He says "Sparklines (...) are small infographics designed
to convey large amounts of information "inline" with the text" and then shows
a big graph. He then continues "From the general shape the graph, the reader
is able to get a sense for the general trend (upwards)" which is absolutely
not true. The graph is too wide to see the upwards trend easily and since
there are no horizontal guide lines I say most people don't notice it.

There is some news site that embeds tiny sparklines of company's stock history
actually inline with the text. That's good use of them.

------
ursablanco
I'm sure there's great uses for these things, but currently they're a solution
in search of a problem. This is wishful thinking:

 _"The last data point, annotated with text and a dot tells the reader the
value, allowing them to intuitively set the scale for the rest of the graph."_

If the HTTP return codes is the killer application for sparklines, I couldn't
say. I'd have to wonder, though, if this were a mission critical issue: Would
you do the same thing?

------
wccrawford
Having only 1 point annotated means that you can't tell the scale of the
graph. Are those little tiny changes over time, or extremely massive ones?

I can't imagine anything I would find this useful for, and if I tried to use
it for something for management, they'd ask the scale as their first question.

------
vincentchu
Hey guys, thanks for the feedback. I've added in code that will also annotate
the first point. See:

[http://img.skitch.com/20100917-c7yqhxg74hq6tr97sfubshc441.pn...](http://img.skitch.com/20100917-c7yqhxg74hq6tr97sfubshc441.png)

------
jarin
Kind of useless without the actual source code, isn't it?

