8 ms·

Chart.js is back online

341 points by karterk 14y ago

maxmcd 14y ago
Small mention in the repo: https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js#license https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js#license Looks like it's (now?) under an MIT license.
- karterk 14y ago
  It was already under MIT license: https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/commit/26962ce2b6ffa2e1f08404616055979a7ae50490 https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/commit/26962ce2b6ffa2e1f0...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
wyck 14y ago
That was a pretty fast turnaround.
matthuggins 14y ago
So what's the story?
- loceng 14y ago
  Probably that it's already out in the wild and might as well take credit for it, and associate positively with it instead of negatively? Or just really clever drama marketing! Kidding.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jimminy 14y ago
  Apparently, it was a misunderstanding on his part. "I misunderstood some issues I wrote about earlier today. Chart.js is now back online and available under MIT. http://www.chartjs.org http://www.chartjs.org ." - https://twitter.com/_nnnick/status/314049798502248448 https://twitter.com/_nnnick/status/314049798502248448
  - jbrooksuk 14y ago
    I really don't see how someone can misunderstand this. You either can do it or you can't.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      I gather the author is UK based and working for a UK company. I imagine 'misunderstand' might be a polite way of saying 'we realised that our decision has caused a lot of negative publicity and we are changing our mind'. That is how it works in organisations I have worked for in the past. Or then again, the author could literally have mistaken what the manager said.
      - pekk 14y ago
        That seems less of a polite way of saying, and more like a butt-covering lie. Am I supposed to understand from 'misunderstand' that the company might be climbing down from a stupid mistake it made, or actually be misled?
        keithpeter 14y ago
        I have no idea about this specific case at all. Could be either a genuine case of the author hearing one thing and the company meaning another, or a change of mind by the company, possibly involving higher ups.
        Robin_Message 14y ago
        In some societies, a "butt-covering lie" is politeness.
        claudius 14y ago
        > Am I supposed to understand from 'misunderstand' that the company might be climbing down from a stupid mistake it made, or actually be misled? No, and you are not supposed to be able to understand. Otherwise being polite and claiming to have misunderstood something wouldn’t make any sense, as it would be equivalent to blaming the company directly.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
robmclarty 14y ago
woot! grats on getting it back up somehow. what happened?
biznickman 14y ago
Ok, is this the best marketing campaign for an open-source project or what?!? I starred it yesterday but my guess is you've got a lot more people on board now!
- jastanton 14y ago
  best marketing campaign? I guess I am not seeing what you're seeing. To what are you referring to?
  - CaveTech 14y ago
    Released -> Taken Down/Died -> Re-released.
    - Torn 14y ago
      Not to mention a few HN posts and hacker outrage / discussion stirring things up. That said, it's probably the internet attention to the takedown that has made it come back up so quickly.
    - krebby 14y ago
      It's New Coke for open source projects!
    - xsace 14y ago
      It's like jesus resurrection, he got all the fame for that.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    It would've been just-another-chart-library without the "my company made me take it down" angle.
  - atwebb 14y ago
    I think it was tongue-in-cheek saying that the publicity from taking it down right after release is giving it better visibility than they could've otherwise.
- 14y ago
dan1234 14y ago
So, was this all just a big marketing ploy?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
whage 14y ago
The web is evolving and it is just beautiful
chenster 14y ago
It didn't say anything about why it is so special?? There are tons of HTML5 client side charts already in existence such as jqplot, highchart, fusionchart..so please let me what makes it so special please.
- MatiasPenas-_- 14y ago
  Beucase an evil boss take down this one, so we must love it.
  - nsmartt 14y ago
    You needn't love the project to consider this a win.
- pekk 14y ago
  It's so awesome that it is a key competitive advantage for the author's company. "This little charting library will make us MILLIONS!" </dr. evil>
- crisnoble 14y ago
  At a glance I think it beats those by being better looking, open source, simple data structure, simple setup. This seems to me to be the quickest way to get a beautiful and interactive line chart onto your webpage.
  - nickporter 14y ago
    Not interactive though.
    - crisnoble 14y ago
      Not interactive.... yet?
      - dopamean 14y ago
        I think he left it non-interactive intentionally for memory reasons.
yogo 14y ago
No labels/legend support for the pie charts? I haven't checked it out too closely but it seems like it would be good to have the percentage labels and what they represent out of the gate.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
whyleyc 14y ago
Looks like http://www.expert-24.com/ http://www.expert-24.com/ had a change of heart :) Source: https://workfu.com/nick https://workfu.com/nick
2321sdadas 14y ago
http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/ http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/ is better anyway
- donohoe 14y ago
  This is all under the heading on their docs page on "Getting Started"... Getting started Add morris.js and its dependencies (jQuery & Raphaël) to your page. <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.oesmith.co.uk/morris-0.4.1.min.css"> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/raphael/2.1.0/raphael-min.js"></script> <script src="http://cdn.oesmith.co.uk/morris-0.4.1.min.js"></script> Um. No, don't think so. Too much over-head
tzaman 14y ago
Welcome back. Nick, if you want it to be really successful, add a little bit of interactivity, at least labels to pie/doughnut charts and hover values on line charts. Then it's perfect.
- d4mi3n 14y ago
  The project mentions that this was an intentional design decision. The graph's are written to a canvas element, which means a low memory footprint and the ability to save graphs as images. I believe they'd need to switch over to using SVG elements for graphs if there are plans to add DOM events to chart elements.
  - tzaman 14y ago
    Canvas can be used for labels and interactivity too: http://chartbeat.com/publishing/demo/ http://chartbeat.com/publishing/demo/
  - krcz 14y ago
    Clicks and hovers can be done on canvas, using hack that renders on second (invisible) canvas each object with its own, constant color and then checking color of the pixel at coordinates of cursor. It would probably need some kind of scene abstraction though.
    - derefr 14y ago
      Alternatively, just put some invisible DOM elements on top of the canvas and put your click handlers on those. It's imagemaps all over again ;)
      - bluesmoon 14y ago
        This is how flot works. The base chart is drawn on canvas. All labels including axes, legends and mouseovers are DOM elements that are absolutely positioned over the canvas. The canvas itself is always inside a canvascontainer div that also contains all the other dom elements.
kmfrk 14y ago
My #1 feature request is a fall-back that allows people to print the charts. This currently won't work for articles, unfortunately.
- rohansingh 14y ago
  I am able to print all the charts that appear on the home page there with Chrome. At least I can print to PDF, though I don't see why printing to paper wouldn't work just as easily.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Interesting. It's only a problem on Opera, so I suppose it has to do with the Presto rendering engine. So this should fix itself, when Opera switch to WebKit. EDIT: Having said that, there needs to be a print.css for the charts. Things like #000 for labels, axes and such.
keefe 14y ago
awesome congrats! This looks like a solid library, I like widgets that are initialized and configured with JSON. I've used highcharts in the past, I'll check it out next time I need to do some charting...
ep103 14y ago
So why would I use this instead of D3.js?
- arnehormann 14y ago
  or something built on d3 - like http://nvd3.org/ http://nvd3.org/
- tadfisher 14y ago
  D3 uses SVG which doesn't run on older Android and iOS devices at all, and uses a bunch more memory and CPU than a single Canvas element.
- mlarratt 14y ago
  This is a significantly higher abstraction than D3. Charts.js is comparable to NVD3, dc.js, xCharts, all of which are built on top of D3.
  - worldsayshi 14y ago
    Thanks for mentioning these. I didn't know about them. Do you know if there is any good charting higher abstractions for "node" graphs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type))? I only know about the force layout ones in d3. Nevermind, I found this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7034/graph-visualization-code-in-javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7034/graph-visualization-... (Although I'm still lokking for a good tool for visualizing path algorithms (TSP, A* etc))
- kmfrk 14y ago
  hn.txt
friggeri 14y ago
"Pie charts are great at comparing proportions within a single data set." No they're not.
- DigitalJack 14y ago
  Yes they are.
  - davebees 14y ago
    For comparing two portions they’re okay. For larger data sets it can be difficult to compare the sectors: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Piecharts.svg/689px-Piecharts.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Pie...
    - stdbrouw 14y ago
      Exactly, they're great for binary groups: <facet> yes/no
  - flog 14y ago
    Proof: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Pie+charts+are+great+at+comparing+proportions+within+a+single+data+set&chts=000000,14&chs=600x300&chf=bg,s,ffffff&cht=p&chd=t:50.00,50.00&chl=Yes+they+are|No+theyre+not&chco=990000,0000ff http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Pie+charts+are+great...
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Tufte wept.
- andypants 14y ago
  Is this something to do with the area of circle sectors?
- jbackus 14y ago
  Most people don't know/care about the statistical reality of pie charts and their lack of clarity. Maybe they are statistically proven to be bad at conveying differences in comparison to a bar graph, but if all you care about is the adoption of your charting API then you'd be a fool to not include pie charts. Sometimes being correct isn't the most important thing :)
jstsch 14y ago
They look quite nice. But I would prefer that the default way of initializing the dataset is by loading a HTML table. This way content would always be accessible, even without Javscript and also by crawlers like Google.
- ceslami 14y ago
  There's nothing stopping you from doing that with a pinch of javascript.
  - jstsch 14y ago
    Of course :) I just think that doing it from a HTML table is best practice and it's always nice when a library promotes these. Most developers simply go: 1) I want chart 2) Chart needs JSON 3) I give chart JSON
gadamc 14y ago
I think its completely crazy that hardly any of the charting tools in javascript support error bars! Only Highcharts 3.0 beta supports error bars, as far as I know. Data are absolutely meaningless without error bars and its not very smart to use that data without appropriate estimates of uncertainty.
- bryanh 14y ago
  Really? Most folks just want to chart signups, lead submissions or similar in a time period. No uncertainty at all.
aniketpant 14y ago
Really happy that Chart.js is back because if it didn't come back, I would have been able to use only xCharts (http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts) which I find less versatile. Apart from this, I don't get the comments at the top! Is this what HN users think of open source projects which spring up from time to time! If a project is taken down due to IP rights and then comes back to life after a day, is that all a marketing campaign? Don't you think of it as an accomplishment for the community? And this is not the first time that HN users just go about destroying someone's project in a second. Shouldn't we help in giving the person a direction and helping him out.
danso 14y ago
Congrats on being able to open source this and thank you for doing so. Honest question: Is animation really a needed feature for this? The opening animation adds no information value and has the negative effect of making the user think the graphics are actually interactive. I'm sure the animation itself isn't memory/processor intensive but it seems like a really unnecessary feature for a charting library that creates very beautiful, static graphs. edit: OK everyone, I'm not an idiot: of course you should use animated graphs when showing things to the suits...that's the number one rule of graphic design, I believe :). I only questioned it here because the OP's focus seems to be on a fairly clean and minimalist library, and the one-time startup animations seems to go against that aesthetic. But no doubt, they do liven up the page.
- kaushikt 14y ago
  Animations on graphs have come too far. But i can agree with you on some part that at a few places animations are not needed. If you look at the documentation (http://www.chartjs.org/docs/ http://www.chartjs.org/docs/) then you can choose in the configurations to switch it off for all the graphs. Total power !
  - t0mislav 14y ago
    I agree. While animation is nice in some ways, it really isn't necessary. Animations nowdays are far too long. Fortunately, it is possible to disable or speed up.
- incongruity 14y ago
  (Not having played with chart.js) If the values change at any point and the display is updated, animation is much, much more than eye-candy. It's cognitive reassurance and an affordance that allows the user to more readily understand what is changing and how it's changing. (source: I did the work equivalent to a master's thesis in grad school on building a tool for visualizing qualitative data)
  - dkersten 14y ago
    I think subtle animation for transitions and changes make for a much more pleasant user experience than when there are no animations, but animations for the sake of animation should, IMHO, be avoided. For example, I find the animated fade-in effect on the chart.js site to be distracting.
belgianguy 14y ago
I'm really happy to see this project resurface, I had already added it to my "must check out" projects. Glad Nick pulled it off. I don't care about the how and why it's back, I'm just happy that it is.
conesus 14y ago
Nice work! The JS breaks on magnification, but I submitted a pull request to fix that right up: https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/pull/27 https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/pull/27
theoutlander 14y ago
This is great. I started to stub out Highcharts for Script# and was wondering how this library compares to it? I did a lot of research and decided to use Highcharts. Can you please list the pros/cons between Chart.js and Highcharts? Thanks!
polskibus 14y ago
congrats on being on HN front page for the third time on such a short timeframe! This project must be really loved by the community ;)
t0mislav 14y ago
This is all what I need for my next (little) project, no need to search anymore.
citricsquid 14y ago
I was asleep while this happened, can someone post a copy of the message or whatever it was? There's absolutely no context any more.
- jontas 14y ago
  I dont have the original post, but the author wrote earlier today that due to copyright/licensing issues with his previous employer he had to take down the project he had released as open source. Also, just wanted to say hi--remember me? You gave me karmawhores years ago, just wanted to say thanks again!
Cyranix 14y ago
I'm currently a Highcharts advocate, but this looks quite promising. Would love to see a comparison between the two (not sure if I have bandwidth to do it myself).
- ville 14y ago
  First thing that comes to mind is that Chart.js has less restrictive licencing. Chart.js available under the MIT licence, while Highcharts has a paid commercial licence and CC licence for non-profit projects.
anonfunction 14y ago
Would be great if they added support for tooltip style labels on datapoints!
mastef 14y ago
the ?apo and ?back links will do some nice statistics on click generation, and the numbers regarding user participation after first and second launch in an open source project will be good too. might we see a paper coming in the future about this stunt? maybe an internal memo with a proper TPS report on how to maximize open source participation. of course release to the unnamed company internally only, let's call it Initech.
jbackus 14y ago
Does Chart.JS provide any labeling solution for pie charts like Highcharts does? What I'm talking about: http://jsfiddle.net/mgbNb/3/embedded/result/ http://jsfiddle.net/mgbNb/3/embedded/result/
heck0045 14y ago
Yay! Nick: glad your employer changed their tune. Long live open source :) The article I wrote for infoq is up now: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/03/chartjs-v.0.1-released http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/03/chartjs-v.0.1-released
akcreek 14y ago
Just a heads up. I'm having trouble with the docs page navigation on my 13" macbook in Safari. The navigation is taller than the screen, which shouldn't be a problem, but when I try to scroll while hovered over the navigation it is scrolling the page instead of the navigation most of the time. I'm having to find certain spots that will allow me to scroll the navigation instead so I can reach the bottom options.
dudus 14y ago
Why someone would design a charting library and design the dataTable without reusing someone else's format is completely beyond me. This one is specially bad because it mixes format with content, I thought we learned it was bad idea when we came up with CSS. Why not use the same data format as Google Chart Tools and make it dead simple to switch from one library to the other or to integrate with several data sources available for Google Chart Tools? And if you are still mad about Reader and feel rebel just use the same format as highcharts or <insert here random charting library here>. Don't get me wrong, I think this is beautiful, and other than this small design rant I appreciate your work a lot and the effort to bring it to the world open source. Thanks a lot.
- taybenlor 14y ago
  It's open source, fork it and make these changes yourself.
studyhall101 14y ago
Good to hear! Thank you. From the developers at http://toptestprep.com http://toptestprep.com
drivebyacct2 14y ago
And now I see why people were so excited about this! This is very impressive, I only hope that I remember it or can find it by Googling "charts javascript library" when I find a time to use it!
slmt 14y ago
The charts are nice and everything about the site looks well presented, including the thorough documentation. My only gripe is the lack of chart types at the moment (e.g. candlestick), but with the fundamentals well and truly in place, I imagine more chart types will be added with time.

341 points by karterk 14y ago

Small mention in the repo: https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js#license https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js#license Looks like it's (now?) under an MIT license.

karterk 14y ago
It was already under MIT license: https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/commit/26962ce2b6ffa2e1f08404616055979a7ae50490 https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/commit/26962ce2b6ffa2e1f0...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

wyck 14y ago

That was a pretty fast turnaround.

matthuggins 14y ago

So what's the story?

loceng 14y ago
Probably that it's already out in the wild and might as well take credit for it, and associate positively with it instead of negatively? Or just really clever drama marketing! Kidding.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jimminy 14y ago
Apparently, it was a misunderstanding on his part. "I misunderstood some issues I wrote about earlier today. Chart.js is now back online and available under MIT. http://www.chartjs.org http://www.chartjs.org ." - https://twitter.com/_nnnick/status/314049798502248448 https://twitter.com/_nnnick/status/314049798502248448
- jbrooksuk 14y ago
  I really don't see how someone can misunderstand this. You either can do it or you can't.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    I gather the author is UK based and working for a UK company. I imagine 'misunderstand' might be a polite way of saying 'we realised that our decision has caused a lot of negative publicity and we are changing our mind'. That is how it works in organisations I have worked for in the past. Or then again, the author could literally have mistaken what the manager said.
    - pekk 14y ago
      That seems less of a polite way of saying, and more like a butt-covering lie. Am I supposed to understand from 'misunderstand' that the company might be climbing down from a stupid mistake it made, or actually be misled?
      - keithpeter 14y ago
        I have no idea about this specific case at all. Could be either a genuine case of the author hearing one thing and the company meaning another, or a change of mind by the company, possibly involving higher ups.
      - Robin_Message 14y ago
        In some societies, a "butt-covering lie" is politeness.
      - claudius 14y ago
        > Am I supposed to understand from 'misunderstand' that the company might be climbing down from a stupid mistake it made, or actually be misled? No, and you are not supposed to be able to understand. Otherwise being polite and claiming to have misunderstood something wouldn’t make any sense, as it would be equivalent to blaming the company directly.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

robmclarty 14y ago

woot! grats on getting it back up somehow. what happened?

biznickman 14y ago

Ok, is this the best marketing campaign for an open-source project or what?!? I starred it yesterday but my guess is you've got a lot more people on board now!

jastanton 14y ago
best marketing campaign? I guess I am not seeing what you're seeing. To what are you referring to?
- CaveTech 14y ago
  Released -> Taken Down/Died -> Re-released.
  - Torn 14y ago
    Not to mention a few HN posts and hacker outrage / discussion stirring things up. That said, it's probably the internet attention to the takedown that has made it come back up so quickly.
  - krebby 14y ago
    It's New Coke for open source projects!
  - xsace 14y ago
    It's like jesus resurrection, he got all the fame for that.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  It would've been just-another-chart-library without the "my company made me take it down" angle.
- atwebb 14y ago
  I think it was tongue-in-cheek saying that the publicity from taking it down right after release is giving it better visibility than they could've otherwise.
14y ago

dan1234 14y ago

So, was this all just a big marketing ploy?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

whage 14y ago

The web is evolving and it is just beautiful

chenster 14y ago

It didn't say anything about why it is so special?? There are tons of HTML5 client side charts already in existence such as jqplot, highchart, fusionchart..so please let me what makes it so special please.

MatiasPenas-_- 14y ago
Beucase an evil boss take down this one, so we must love it.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  You needn't love the project to consider this a win.
pekk 14y ago
It's so awesome that it is a key competitive advantage for the author's company. "This little charting library will make us MILLIONS!" </dr. evil>
crisnoble 14y ago
At a glance I think it beats those by being better looking, open source, simple data structure, simple setup. This seems to me to be the quickest way to get a beautiful and interactive line chart onto your webpage.
- nickporter 14y ago
  Not interactive though.
  - crisnoble 14y ago
    Not interactive.... yet?
    - dopamean 14y ago
      I think he left it non-interactive intentionally for memory reasons.

yogo 14y ago

No labels/legend support for the pie charts? I haven't checked it out too closely but it seems like it would be good to have the percentage labels and what they represent out of the gate.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

whyleyc 14y ago

Looks like http://www.expert-24.com/ http://www.expert-24.com/ had a change of heart :) Source: https://workfu.com/nick https://workfu.com/nick

2321sdadas 14y ago

http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/ http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/ is better anyway

donohoe 14y ago
This is all under the heading on their docs page on "Getting Started"... Getting started Add morris.js and its dependencies (jQuery & Raphaël) to your page. <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.oesmith.co.uk/morris-0.4.1.min.css"> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/raphael/2.1.0/raphael-min.js"></script> <script src="http://cdn.oesmith.co.uk/morris-0.4.1.min.js"></script> Um. No, don't think so. Too much over-head

tzaman 14y ago

Welcome back. Nick, if you want it to be really successful, add a little bit of interactivity, at least labels to pie/doughnut charts and hover values on line charts. Then it's perfect.

d4mi3n 14y ago
The project mentions that this was an intentional design decision. The graph's are written to a canvas element, which means a low memory footprint and the ability to save graphs as images. I believe they'd need to switch over to using SVG elements for graphs if there are plans to add DOM events to chart elements.
- tzaman 14y ago
  Canvas can be used for labels and interactivity too: http://chartbeat.com/publishing/demo/ http://chartbeat.com/publishing/demo/
- krcz 14y ago
  Clicks and hovers can be done on canvas, using hack that renders on second (invisible) canvas each object with its own, constant color and then checking color of the pixel at coordinates of cursor. It would probably need some kind of scene abstraction though.
  - derefr 14y ago
    Alternatively, just put some invisible DOM elements on top of the canvas and put your click handlers on those. It's imagemaps all over again ;)
    - bluesmoon 14y ago
      This is how flot works. The base chart is drawn on canvas. All labels including axes, legends and mouseovers are DOM elements that are absolutely positioned over the canvas. The canvas itself is always inside a canvascontainer div that also contains all the other dom elements.

kmfrk 14y ago

My #1 feature request is a fall-back that allows people to print the charts. This currently won't work for articles, unfortunately.

rohansingh 14y ago
I am able to print all the charts that appear on the home page there with Chrome. At least I can print to PDF, though I don't see why printing to paper wouldn't work just as easily.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Interesting. It's only a problem on Opera, so I suppose it has to do with the Presto rendering engine. So this should fix itself, when Opera switch to WebKit. EDIT: Having said that, there needs to be a print.css for the charts. Things like #000 for labels, axes and such.

keefe 14y ago

awesome congrats! This looks like a solid library, I like widgets that are initialized and configured with JSON. I've used highcharts in the past, I'll check it out next time I need to do some charting...

ep103 14y ago

So why would I use this instead of D3.js?

arnehormann 14y ago
or something built on d3 - like http://nvd3.org/ http://nvd3.org/
tadfisher 14y ago
D3 uses SVG which doesn't run on older Android and iOS devices at all, and uses a bunch more memory and CPU than a single Canvas element.
mlarratt 14y ago
This is a significantly higher abstraction than D3. Charts.js is comparable to NVD3, dc.js, xCharts, all of which are built on top of D3.
- worldsayshi 14y ago
  Thanks for mentioning these. I didn't know about them. Do you know if there is any good charting higher abstractions for "node" graphs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type))? I only know about the force layout ones in d3. Nevermind, I found this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7034/graph-visualization-code-in-javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7034/graph-visualization-... (Although I'm still lokking for a good tool for visualizing path algorithms (TSP, A* etc))
kmfrk 14y ago
hn.txt

friggeri 14y ago

"Pie charts are great at comparing proportions within a single data set." No they're not.

DigitalJack 14y ago
Yes they are.
- davebees 14y ago
  For comparing two portions they’re okay. For larger data sets it can be difficult to compare the sectors: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Piecharts.svg/689px-Piecharts.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Pie...
  - stdbrouw 14y ago
    Exactly, they're great for binary groups: <facet> yes/no
- flog 14y ago
  Proof: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Pie+charts+are+great+at+comparing+proportions+within+a+single+data+set&chts=000000,14&chs=600x300&chf=bg,s,ffffff&cht=p&chd=t:50.00,50.00&chl=Yes+they+are|No+theyre+not&chco=990000,0000ff http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Pie+charts+are+great...
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Tufte wept.
andypants 14y ago
Is this something to do with the area of circle sectors?
jbackus 14y ago
Most people don't know/care about the statistical reality of pie charts and their lack of clarity. Maybe they are statistically proven to be bad at conveying differences in comparison to a bar graph, but if all you care about is the adoption of your charting API then you'd be a fool to not include pie charts. Sometimes being correct isn't the most important thing :)

jstsch 14y ago

They look quite nice. But I would prefer that the default way of initializing the dataset is by loading a HTML table. This way content would always be accessible, even without Javscript and also by crawlers like Google.

ceslami 14y ago
There's nothing stopping you from doing that with a pinch of javascript.
- jstsch 14y ago
  Of course :) I just think that doing it from a HTML table is best practice and it's always nice when a library promotes these. Most developers simply go: 1) I want chart 2) Chart needs JSON 3) I give chart JSON

gadamc 14y ago

I think its completely crazy that hardly any of the charting tools in javascript support error bars! Only Highcharts 3.0 beta supports error bars, as far as I know. Data are absolutely meaningless without error bars and its not very smart to use that data without appropriate estimates of uncertainty.

bryanh 14y ago
Really? Most folks just want to chart signups, lead submissions or similar in a time period. No uncertainty at all.

aniketpant 14y ago

Really happy that Chart.js is back because if it didn't come back, I would have been able to use only xCharts (http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts) which I find less versatile. Apart from this, I don't get the comments at the top! Is this what HN users think of open source projects which spring up from time to time! If a project is taken down due to IP rights and then comes back to life after a day, is that all a marketing campaign? Don't you think of it as an accomplishment for the community? And this is not the first time that HN users just go about destroying someone's project in a second. Shouldn't we help in giving the person a direction and helping him out.

danso 14y ago

Congrats on being able to open source this and thank you for doing so. Honest question: Is animation really a needed feature for this? The opening animation adds no information value and has the negative effect of making the user think the graphics are actually interactive. I'm sure the animation itself isn't memory/processor intensive but it seems like a really unnecessary feature for a charting library that creates very beautiful, static graphs. edit: OK everyone, I'm not an idiot: of course you should use animated graphs when showing things to the suits...that's the number one rule of graphic design, I believe :). I only questioned it here because the OP's focus seems to be on a fairly clean and minimalist library, and the one-time startup animations seems to go against that aesthetic. But no doubt, they do liven up the page.

kaushikt 14y ago
Animations on graphs have come too far. But i can agree with you on some part that at a few places animations are not needed. If you look at the documentation (http://www.chartjs.org/docs/ http://www.chartjs.org/docs/) then you can choose in the configurations to switch it off for all the graphs. Total power !
- t0mislav 14y ago
  I agree. While animation is nice in some ways, it really isn't necessary. Animations nowdays are far too long. Fortunately, it is possible to disable or speed up.
incongruity 14y ago
(Not having played with chart.js) If the values change at any point and the display is updated, animation is much, much more than eye-candy. It's cognitive reassurance and an affordance that allows the user to more readily understand what is changing and how it's changing. (source: I did the work equivalent to a master's thesis in grad school on building a tool for visualizing qualitative data)
- dkersten 14y ago
  I think subtle animation for transitions and changes make for a much more pleasant user experience than when there are no animations, but animations for the sake of animation should, IMHO, be avoided. For example, I find the animated fade-in effect on the chart.js site to be distracting.

belgianguy 14y ago

I'm really happy to see this project resurface, I had already added it to my "must check out" projects. Glad Nick pulled it off. I don't care about the how and why it's back, I'm just happy that it is.

conesus 14y ago

Nice work! The JS breaks on magnification, but I submitted a pull request to fix that right up: https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/pull/27 https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/pull/27

theoutlander 14y ago

This is great. I started to stub out Highcharts for Script# and was wondering how this library compares to it? I did a lot of research and decided to use Highcharts. Can you please list the pros/cons between Chart.js and Highcharts? Thanks!

polskibus 14y ago

congrats on being on HN front page for the third time on such a short timeframe! This project must be really loved by the community ;)

t0mislav 14y ago

This is all what I need for my next (little) project, no need to search anymore.

citricsquid 14y ago

I was asleep while this happened, can someone post a copy of the message or whatever it was? There's absolutely no context any more.

jontas 14y ago
I dont have the original post, but the author wrote earlier today that due to copyright/licensing issues with his previous employer he had to take down the project he had released as open source. Also, just wanted to say hi--remember me? You gave me karmawhores years ago, just wanted to say thanks again!

Cyranix 14y ago

I'm currently a Highcharts advocate, but this looks quite promising. Would love to see a comparison between the two (not sure if I have bandwidth to do it myself).

ville 14y ago
First thing that comes to mind is that Chart.js has less restrictive licencing. Chart.js available under the MIT licence, while Highcharts has a paid commercial licence and CC licence for non-profit projects.

anonfunction 14y ago

Would be great if they added support for tooltip style labels on datapoints!

mastef 14y ago

the ?apo and ?back links will do some nice statistics on click generation, and the numbers regarding user participation after first and second launch in an open source project will be good too. might we see a paper coming in the future about this stunt? maybe an internal memo with a proper TPS report on how to maximize open source participation. of course release to the unnamed company internally only, let's call it Initech.

jbackus 14y ago

Does Chart.JS provide any labeling solution for pie charts like Highcharts does? What I'm talking about: http://jsfiddle.net/mgbNb/3/embedded/result/ http://jsfiddle.net/mgbNb/3/embedded/result/

heck0045 14y ago

Yay! Nick: glad your employer changed their tune. Long live open source :) The article I wrote for infoq is up now: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/03/chartjs-v.0.1-released http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/03/chartjs-v.0.1-released

akcreek 14y ago

Just a heads up. I'm having trouble with the docs page navigation on my 13" macbook in Safari. The navigation is taller than the screen, which shouldn't be a problem, but when I try to scroll while hovered over the navigation it is scrolling the page instead of the navigation most of the time. I'm having to find certain spots that will allow me to scroll the navigation instead so I can reach the bottom options.

dudus 14y ago

Why someone would design a charting library and design the dataTable without reusing someone else's format is completely beyond me. This one is specially bad because it mixes format with content, I thought we learned it was bad idea when we came up with CSS. Why not use the same data format as Google Chart Tools and make it dead simple to switch from one library to the other or to integrate with several data sources available for Google Chart Tools? And if you are still mad about Reader and feel rebel just use the same format as highcharts or <insert here random charting library here>. Don't get me wrong, I think this is beautiful, and other than this small design rant I appreciate your work a lot and the effort to bring it to the world open source. Thanks a lot.

taybenlor 14y ago
It's open source, fork it and make these changes yourself.

studyhall101 14y ago

Good to hear! Thank you. From the developers at http://toptestprep.com http://toptestprep.com

drivebyacct2 14y ago

And now I see why people were so excited about this! This is very impressive, I only hope that I remember it or can find it by Googling "charts javascript library" when I find a time to use it!

slmt 14y ago

The charts are nice and everything about the site looks well presented, including the thorough documentation. My only gripe is the lack of chart types at the moment (e.g. candlestick), but with the fundamentals well and truly in place, I imagine more chart types will be added with time.