Heatmaps are an excellent tool for visualizing data with a two dimensional spatial component. They are frequently used to map out player deaths in shooter games. The most common heatmaps use the location of the victim and aggregate the number of kills as the visualized measure. However, this simple metric doesn’t tell the whole story. With a few simple tweaks we can build balance and flow maps, which can be useful tools for understanding the way players use the map.

This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure

I love the iPhone as everything but a phone. I barely get any reception where I live or where I work. It feels like I get dropped calls all the time. I didn’t know there was any way to get real quantitative information about your experiences, until now. It turns out that when you sync your phone with iTunes it collects all the information about your phone calls and stores them on your computer.

After almost two years of work the Transformers: War for Cybertron game is finally done and the demo is available for download. I had to rewrite some of the code in our data collection system* because so many people are playing! So far the reception has been really good. The demo currently has a 4.5 / 5 star rating and the forums seem to be filled with positive comments.

I’ve combined my love of track days with my love of data analytics. Here’s a summary of data from my lap timer. Dashboard Powered by Tableau

RescueTime is a great tool for monitoring what you do. It allows you to big-brother yourself. You install a background service that monitors which applications you’re using and it aggregates and sorts the data in a way that helps you understand what you’re spening your time doing. This is a live chart of how I’m currently spending my month. I think most of the ‘untagged’ time is consumed by random web sites I’m visiting.

Console video games run on memory restricted environments and even with half a gigabyte of space it runs out quickly. It’s easy to know when you’re out of memory, what we want to know is exactly what approach to take to fix the problem. With all the information available the challenge is presenting the information in a way that gives clear indication of problems while providing enough low-level detail to zero in on individual assets.

Update: the USGS has changed their service and this app no longer works. Plus, I lost the source code after a hard drive crash. Remember - back up your data! Flash, and Flex in particular, has a solid set of tools available ata visualization. When I found that the USGS provided realtime earthquake data as csv files I couldn’t resist building a viewer. It’s based on a traffic map by Nathan at Flowing Data