agitcraft

I thought it would be interesting to share some algorithms that can be used to solve problems you may run into while developing applications.

Given a variable number of numeric values, which of those values is the “outlier.” In this case, by outlier, we mean the most distant number. For example, given the set [1, 2, 3, 10], the outlying number is clearly 10 since it is further in value from the other numbers than any other.

How do we determine this? We calculate the sum of the distances from each value to each other value. That value looks like this:

The value in your list for which this expression is greatest is your outlier. This works for any set of values for which you can define a distance function. In the case of single values, the distance function is simply:

For coordinate values on a cartesian plane, the function is:

These can of course be extended into any number of dimensions depending on your needs. Here’s a demo that applies the idea.

In the demo above you can see that the outlying, or most distant, point glows in black. You can drag the points around and the outlying point will update accordingly. You can also see a skeleton drawn among the points demonstrating the values being calculated in our distance formula.

I don’t doubt that flexicious is, as their site claims, a “MUST HAVE” flex datagrid. What I do doubt is that many people will have a better idea than I do what the hell is going on when I look at their demo.

Ho. Lee. Crap. What we’re looking at is a very complicated DataGrid, the flash world’s version of the spreadsheet. Considering that most people’s entire experience with spreadsheets consists of, at most, viewing Excel documents this presentation is unnecessarily complicated.

Upon first glance, I have no idea what many of these controls are supposed to do. Clearly, this is a powerful spreadsheet. I think. I am kind of afraid to touch anything though. Admittedly, I don’t do as much work with large sets of data as some people certainly do, so perhaps its my limited experience with this volume of information that makes so much of this interface seem foreign and confusing to me.

Without jumping too far in depth as to what I found so confusing about Flexicious, I’ll just present my general reactions to it with a few accompanying screenshots. My reactions proceed as follows:

1. I don’t like this.
   
2. I DEFINITELY don’t like this.
   
3. This is pretty clever, but the layout makes me claustrophobic.
   
4. This seems wrong to me on many levels.
   

I understand that it’s hard to invent new visual metaphors for navigating data, especially as the volume of that data grows, but that’s all the more reason one should be extra careful not to go over the deep end and risk alienating users. I’m impressed by the amount of functionality that’s obviously built into flexicious, but at the same time I’m afraid to use it. What good is that?

I’ve just updated Vidiot to use the Sprint 10 release of Adobe’s OSMF, and I’ve added a bug fix that will allow streaming video from Edgecast.

To view a demo, check out my original post. The latest files, along with a sample application, can be found by clicking here.