4 ms·

The low-price contender is Periscope (periscopedata.com).

HappyTypist 11y ago
For the record, Periscope has an incredibly poor UX. It suggests "run selected query" when you highlight a single column name... As if that's valid sql.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Are there other examples of poor UX? Overeager pattern matching alone wouldn't bother me, but if it's a sign of other inattentiveness...
  - lmeyerov 11y ago
    Periscope is in a distinct, lower tier of usability. You write SQL. Or, put differently, the innovation of Tableau was so you don't have to write SQL for most visual encodings, even non-trivial ones.
    - infinite8s 11y ago
      However that does limit you a bit when wanting to do deeper analysis. Looker/Periscope are tools for analysts who know and are comfortable with SQL. (Disclaimer- no affiliation, just trying to build a desktop tool that sits in the spectrum between Tableau and Jupyter Notebook)
      - lmeyerov 11y ago
        You can still write SQL in Tableau, that's table stakes. Funny to me: it took years for Heap to introduce that. Edit: we use and help customers with IPython/zepellin etc, but that doesn't change that these things are 10 years behind as IDE/visual interfaces. Adding charting & drilldowns is much harder than a button to turn a table into a line graph, and analysts are wasting a lot of time due to this.
        infinite8s 11y ago
        Yes, completely agreed. There's a continuum of UX between BI tools like Tableau/Qlikview and the interactive prompts used by most data scientists (mainly around the non-interactivity of display)- it's sad that an 80 character static tty display is still the state of the art in that space. While I'm very comfortable in ipython/terminal I often wish I could easily pop up a Tableau interface on top of my pandas analysis. Jupyter is getting there slowly but the widgets people are building are still more geared toward display than interacting with data (both original and derived) directly. Even the new set of SAAS BI tools (Looker, Mode, etc) leave interaction as a secondary concern. I think that's the main difference between tools geared towards reporting/publishing (most of the BI world) and tools geared toward data analysis (R, python, etc). As you point out, the tools for data analysis are years behind the BI tools in terms of UI/UX (or their focus is more on IDEs for developers rather than analysts). As a side note, I've been following your work for a while now (both Superconductor and Graphistry) - mind if I shoot you a few questions privately?
        lmeyerov 11y ago
        Of course, always happy to help! Leo@g....com

For the record, Periscope has an incredibly poor UX. It suggests "run selected query" when you highlight a single column name... As if that's valid sql.

nitrogen 11y ago
Are there other examples of poor UX? Overeager pattern matching alone wouldn't bother me, but if it's a sign of other inattentiveness...
- lmeyerov 11y ago
  Periscope is in a distinct, lower tier of usability. You write SQL. Or, put differently, the innovation of Tableau was so you don't have to write SQL for most visual encodings, even non-trivial ones.
  - infinite8s 11y ago
    However that does limit you a bit when wanting to do deeper analysis. Looker/Periscope are tools for analysts who know and are comfortable with SQL. (Disclaimer- no affiliation, just trying to build a desktop tool that sits in the spectrum between Tableau and Jupyter Notebook)
    - lmeyerov 11y ago
      You can still write SQL in Tableau, that's table stakes. Funny to me: it took years for Heap to introduce that. Edit: we use and help customers with IPython/zepellin etc, but that doesn't change that these things are 10 years behind as IDE/visual interfaces. Adding charting & drilldowns is much harder than a button to turn a table into a line graph, and analysts are wasting a lot of time due to this.
      - infinite8s 11y ago
        Yes, completely agreed. There's a continuum of UX between BI tools like Tableau/Qlikview and the interactive prompts used by most data scientists (mainly around the non-interactivity of display)- it's sad that an 80 character static tty display is still the state of the art in that space. While I'm very comfortable in ipython/terminal I often wish I could easily pop up a Tableau interface on top of my pandas analysis. Jupyter is getting there slowly but the widgets people are building are still more geared toward display than interacting with data (both original and derived) directly. Even the new set of SAAS BI tools (Looker, Mode, etc) leave interaction as a secondary concern. I think that's the main difference between tools geared towards reporting/publishing (most of the BI world) and tools geared toward data analysis (R, python, etc). As you point out, the tools for data analysis are years behind the BI tools in terms of UI/UX (or their focus is more on IDEs for developers rather than analysts). As a side note, I've been following your work for a while now (both Superconductor and Graphistry) - mind if I shoot you a few questions privately?
      - lmeyerov 11y ago
        Of course, always happy to help! Leo@g....com