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I like the idea of sparklines and I have used them myself on occasion. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've actually ever found a sparklines plot in

• cldellow 9y ago
  We run a Spark cluster for distributed processing. Spark is awesome - makes it dead easy to parallelize work. But it's also easy to write bad Spark code that doesn't parallelize well. So I wrote a report to let us view key stats broken out by Spark job, including a sparkline of avg load on the machines running the job for its duration. This provides an easy way to see whether a job uses the cluster efficiently, and if it doesn't, where the key points in the job are that it's sitting idle. It also lets us eyeball the repeatability -- if a given batch job's sparklines are wildly varying from run to run, it usually suggests that something funky is going on in the code. Also, it lets us have "Spark" lines. Worth it for the pun alone, IMO.
  • dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    Neat!
• abraae 9y ago
  (cynically) sparklines are awesome eye candy for flogging your product. Any new HR product should have a hero page with: - a couple of sparklines - a mugshot of user/candidate - some important looking numbers in a giant-assed sans serif font Throw in a social media-like feed down the side of the page for added oomph. Things have moved on from the days when a pie chart was table stakes.
  • rangibaby 9y ago
    Every product only needs one sparkline anyway. 0% on the left, and bit of up and down (to make it look realistic) then a steep climb to 101% on the right.
    • Crespyl 9y ago
      My error metrics dashboard begs to differ. Maybe we can just relabel everything in terms of "features discovered".
• code_duck 9y ago
  The examples listed with sparklines embedded in headlines are not graceful or intuitive at all... to me it instinctively appears to be an ad and i gloss over it.
• vacri 9y ago
  Sparklines are good for at-a-glance monitoring, as they're a way to show travelling-window patterns in a small space. They're useless for numbers, but great for patterns.
  • musage 9y ago
    I prefer something to that that I'm sure that has a name, but I don't know it (but would love to), at least for real-time things: Let's say you have X buckets, with Y slots each. Each tick, you put the current value in the current slot of the first bucket, and advance the index by one. When the index reaches the number of slots, reset the index to 0, and put the average of all slots of the first bucket into the current slot of the second bucket. When the second bucket overflows, put the average into the current slot of the third bucket, and so on. This way you can fit both current and very old values into the same tiny graph, to give a rough impression of "level of activity" (e.g. for tray icons). If that doesn't have a name yet because I invented it (I doubt that), I call it syrup buckets (syrup is how it can look like depending on the amount of buckets, slots and the tick speed).
• WorldMaker 9y ago
  I've met finance wonks that find them incredibly useful as quick glance activity meters on stocks and currencies. There are finance widgets that auto-add them every time someone even mentions a stock code like AAPL or a currency code like EUR in a webpage or an email. I don't personally think I would want to live in that world, but more power to those that do, I suppose.