Thursday, January 4th, 2007
Fooplot: function plotting
Dheera Venkatraman has released Fooplot, a new website that plots any function, and supports Google Maps-style panning around.
Fooplot is currently using SVG and VML to do the rendering and canvas support is coming for Safari.
For good SVG browsers like Firefox and Opera, 3D plots work too.
In the future, it will communicate with Google spreadsheets and interact with server-side scripts that do curve fitting and other tasks.
4.6 rating from 16 votes
This is a cool idea! But I can’t get it to graph anything. Anyone else having problems with this in Firefox 2 on Linux?
Nice, but their email address doesn’t yet work… here is the email I wrote to them:
Dear FooPlotters,
Firefox 1.7?!? I assume you mean Firefox 1.5. I wouldn’t too much about being
compatible with Firefox 1.0-, that’s probably something like less than 10% of
Firefox users, anyway.
Safari on the other hand, using canvas sounds like a good idea.
Although I also assume you are aware that Safari nightlies support
SVG, correct?
Thanks,
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
thanks for the note. yeah, the MX was changed a day ago, so perhaps it hasn’t propagated yet everywhere. I am aware of the nightlies supporting SVG in Safari, but I expect it to take a while for a release to propagate to majority usage as usual. The only reason I said 1.7 is that I’ve been using it to test and also that (quite surprisingly) I have found numerous people that have copies of FireFox 1.5.0.5 without SVG support, for whatever reason. I can’t identify why, but perhaps one of the major binary sources may have disabled it in compiling? They do report the canvas tag working, though.
I don’t get why there’s such a push behind graphing in the browser.
Wouldn’t this be more easier to make/cross-browser compatible/pretty/usable if it was done in flash?
no, it would be less compatible if done in flash, then it would only run on the flash platform, instead of the web platform.
i cant find the download link,. is it back to GNUplot?
Very neat! I posted some comments on:
http://mukulblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/fooplot-is-neat.html
Does not work at all in IE, but it works in Opera, thats nice to see. The 3D functions are amazing, I’d like to see the zoom working, too. I hope you go on, a really nice tool.
Email still not working! Here’s some more comments:
1) Add a blog so people can see latest news, leave comments, etc. An
email address doesn’t cut it these days ;)
2) A “Permalink To This” link…
3) Your direct-linking fooplot.com/ is really innovative but
I think you need to expand this API (or at least make it all public).
Anything that I can do in the tool UI should be an option in the URL
(i.e. an option in the URL to specify the graph minx/maxx/miny/maxy,
etc).
Very good use of javascript to do projections of 3-D functions into 2-D. I think it uses decomposition of some sort, but rough on the math. Lovely! Especially cools is that you can type in the URL http://www.fooplot.com/3*x/sin(y) and get a graph for 3x/sin(y)… sweet!
Really cool site.
Really cool site.
http://nchikkam.blogspot.com/2007/06/fooplot-is-really-cool.html