[Qgis-developer] Will be submitting new QGIS D3 Chart plugin - experimental or not

[Barry Rowlingson]

[bit off-topic, more about the viz itself than the plugin repo policy
on "experimental" status]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Neumann, Andreas <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:

> It looks like a very nice plugin - thank you for developing and submitting
> it! Definitely useful for people doing time analysis. I will recommend it to
> my local police, who already is doing crime analysis with QGIS.

 I'm not convinced the graphics are particularly honest. The innermost
cells are so much smaller than the outer ones, and this distorts our
perception of what is important. That might be fixable by varying the
radius non-linearly but that might look weird.

 A straightforward rectangular heat map with square cells doesn't have
this problem. I appreciate you lose the wraparound when plotting hours
of the day over many days, or days of the week over many weeks, but
this circular plot can only do that in one dimension anyway. For
instance in the examples on the plugin page I can't easily compare
Sunday to Monday - the inner ring should connect to the outer ring,
forming a doughnut in 3d!

 You can put a rectangular heatmap inside 8 copies of itself if you
want to emphasise the periodic repeating nature of a dimension, or
even make an interactive heatmap the user can drag infinitely, with
the image repeating - basically mapping the 3d doughnut onto a 2d
sqare!

 Barry