

Lyra: An Interactive Visualization Design Environment - jcr
http://idl.cs.washington.edu/projects/lyra

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danso
How does this differ conceptually from Tableau? Yes, I'm asking this
(annoying) question even though the OP states, "Lyra is more expressive than
interactive systems like Tableau, allowing designers to create custom
visualizations comparable to hand-coded visualizations built with D3 or
Processing."

...yeah, but how exactly? Because it looks about as complicated of a GUI as
Tableau...and I don't have enough knowledge of Tableau to compare it against
the video, as Tableau's interface is so befuddling that I thank God I stumbled
unto web development, as painful as that journey has been, so that I could
code my own interactives rather than have to learn Tableau's conventions.

I guess the issue with Lyra is the same with all other programs that claim
"custom visualization design without writing any code"...the two desired
features, "custom" and "without writing any code"...are, IMHO, at odds with
one another. If you want to do anything custom and interactive, you will
pretty much have to do something as complicated as code...and pushing a series
of buttons and clicking through menus may end up as being as intellectually
challenging as just learning programming.

Also, I don't see how the Lyra visualizations are comparable to D3...D3 is
amazing because it is a relatively minimalistic framework for coding
visualizations...the kind of flexible, expressive visualizations you can do
are possible because you are allowed to expressively code them via D3. I don't
really see how Lyra (or any GUI) could accomplish that conceptual feat.

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russellsprouts
I work on this project.

One crucial thing to make the GUI simpler than code is direct manipulation.
Working with a graphics program, like Inkscape, for example, is much easier
for most graphics tasks than writing raw SVGs.

For most tasks in Lyra, you can simply drag-and-drop elements onto the
visualization to make it respond the way you want. In advanced cases, true,
you do have to navigate menus and buttons. For many of those cases, rather
than writing raw D3 code, there's the Vega project. Vega is a declarative
format for describing visualizations using a JSON format. Lyra generates Vega
specifications for rendering, which can then be modified manually.

Vega: [https://github.com/trifacta/vega](https://github.com/trifacta/vega)

~~~
danso
Thanks for the response...I know of Vega and think this is a great use of it.
Being able to export into an open format already puts this ahead of Tableau in
my book.

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hitlin37
I haven't tried this one, but did use Tableau (weird and difficult to spell)
for a while. But till date, only tool i found useful is Statwing. Tableau is
somewhat helpful with its multiple options but using it isn't intuitive at
all. The thing i liked about Statwing is that just throw your data to it and
start experimenting with different relations between data. I see Statwing as
the first level of analysis and then move to more sophisticated viz in d3 as
next step. But i'm interested in this area and using more of such tools to get
the viz right.

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AustinBGibbons
I've been tracking this for awhile, the design potential is fantastic. I'm
really excited for when it can be used to quickly create dashboards with
streaming updated data.

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polskibus
Great job! Impressive to see an open source project to pick a fight with
established software packages like Tableau. I used many BI packages in my life
(only few of them for longer than a while) and consider my self an
intermediate D3 programmer.

Some feedback if you need it: the UI seems very slow on Chrome, and I don't
find it intuitive - there's a lot of dragging and dropping from various places
to establish a simple data vis. Ideally you'd like to see what is available,
choose it and later play to tweak it, not having to do lots of configuration
upfront. Perhaps you could default your tool to do a line chart (or some other
kind of early visual feedback ) so the user knows he's on the right track from
the beginning?

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Li_spallation
Free software built for astronomy that appears to do what Tableau (and to some
extent Lyra) does, without the gloss.

[http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/](http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/)

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njx
something similar but does dashboards+
[https://my.infocaptor.com/free_data_visualization.php](https://my.infocaptor.com/free_data_visualization.php)

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azeirah
Ah, I love seeing programs inspired by Bret Victor's talks and demos!

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kaeluka
Where does it say it is inspired by Bret Victor?

~~~
lstamour
"Data Table View. Data pipelines include a data table view, using a layout
inspired by Bret Victor [Vic13]." from
[http://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2014-Lyra-
EuroVis.pdf](http://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2014-Lyra-EuroVis.pdf)

