Fresh View

Ah, it’s done! Many, including myself, have expressed some lament over the lack of any purely-visual indicators for Shaun Inman’s Mint. I have some thoughts as to why Shaun shied away from any visual cues. For one, most other web statistic tracking applications inundate the user with useless bar graphs and pie charts that do not succinctly display data in a friendly or accessible manner. Quite naturally, dynamically-generated graphs are hard to do aesthetically for several reasons:

• GD graphics for PHP does not have anti-aliasing
• Flash graphs would be difficult without relying on some external code to create the binary flash data

• Most graphs look horrible as they were slapped together just to show the data. No design was considered in their creation except for the very bright, primary colors used for each data group.

  Fresh View fixes all of this, and more. For one, Fresh View uses SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, to display graphs for the Past Day, Past Week, Past Month, and Past Year. What are the advantages of using SVG over the options listed above? Anti-aliased goodness and open, XML-based goodness. Add in the fact that Firefox 1.5 will have native SVG support, and you have a sweet tasting looking setup. I worked hard to match the look and feel of Mint, so as not to clash with the great aesthetics of Mint, while giving you a quick visual look at your visitor data.

  One of my favorite features is what I call “Weekend Highlighting.” Basically, on the Past Week and Past Month graphs, a translucent box is drawn over the weekend data points that immediately clue you into week and weekend trends. Cool, huh? In addition, if you roll over a data point, the exact amount corresponding to that point is shown in a nifty, JavaScript-driven SVG tooltip. I’m sure that with use, you will discover other cool features that I have not mentioned here.

  Well, enough jabbering! Take a look, get the details, and GO DOWNLOAD IT!