Earlier this year I took a look at jQuery and Javascript charting solutions. Whilst they’re great, they lack a lot of the polish that Flash solutions can give you. This time round, I’m taking a look at some Flash solutions, what’s good, and what’s not so good.

Fusion Charts

Fusion Charts is also a very charting application. Unfortunately, it’s not free if you don’t want Fusion to be advertised on each chart – but some of the animations it uses to create the graphs are pretty sweet. I especially love going through the demo pages.

Fusion Charts starts at $69 upto the hefty $1999 for an Enterprise license.

Update: Fusion Charts have since launched with a free version here: http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/

Open Flash Chart

Open Flash Chart

Open Flash Chart, and now version 2 is the most common flash chart implementation you will find all over the web (probably due to the fact its “open” and free ). The developer has got everything covered, including various takes on the common charts such as bar and line charts. In addition to this, the developer also supports a number of server side libraries, including Ruby, Java, .Net and PHP -  which makes implementation pretty darn easy!

XML/SWF Charts

XML/SWF Charts

Next up is the very sexy XML/SWF Charts. Just check out the way this these charts load in – Pretty amazing stuff.

XML/SWF Charts are as you expect from the name, charts that draw through SWF based on XML data – therefore you can use them with pretty much any programming language as long as you can produce some XML for the SWF to use. This is up there with the best of them!

AnyChart

AnyChart is unfortunately another pay for product, however so it should be. The amount of options that you have and the flexibility is huge! Just check out the above for a taste of what they can do – if you’re looking for a serious implementation, and want to spend some $$$ – AnyChart is definitely the first place to go!

amCharts

amCharts

amCharts is another pay for charting application. They’ve got some good ideas – not far off though from other free versions. They’ve definitely got a corporate angle on things, with existing clients such as Sony, Motorola, Merril Lynch and Procter and Gamble to name a few. They’re also leaning heavily towards the financial aspects of charting (stocks etc), however there is no reason why their charting mechanism cannot be used in any scenario.

Swiff Chart

Swiff Chart

Swiff Chart has a great looking website. I was instantly hit with the Apple-like branding, and had high hopes for some equally branded charts. What I got wasn’t exactly that unfortunately. The application isn’t far off most others, but their examples (which I am sure can be customised) were very odd looking – garish colours, horrible layouts. Not my cup of tea anyway…

Google Visualization API

Google Visualization API

My final example is the Google Visualization API. We’re currently playing around with this at Sony and so far it’s been pretty good to us. One of the key things I like about it is the timeline functionality. You can basically view over time growth and drops within your chart. It also gives the end user the ability to manipulate the chart themselves which most others don’t go anywhere near.

Data again is driven by XML, so implementations are extremely easy and flexible. I can’t go into how we’re using it, but suffice to say we’ve been able to do some pretty cool things with it so far.

So over the past 6 months I’ve taken a look at many jQuery plugins via this website. After some time I thought it would be interesting to see out of all of the plugins I’ve looked at, which ones are getting the most interest. Well the results are in:

Here’s that list:

1. Flot : http://code.google.com/p/flot/

Flot

2. Google Charts : http://maxb.net/scripts/jgcharts/include/demo/

Google Charts

3. Sexy-Combo : http://vladimir-k.blogspot…jquery-plugin.html

Sexy-Combo Plugin Preview

4. Sparkline : http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/

Sparklines

5. (mb)ToolTip : http://pupunzi.wordpress.com/…/mbtooltip/

(mb)ToolTip

6. jqchart : http://jsgt.org/lib/jquery/…/test-use-gradient.html

jqchart

7. Raphaeljs : http://raphaeljs.com/

Raphaeljs

8. Smart Google Map: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-googlemap/

9. Alphanumeric : http://itgroup.com.ph/alphanumeric/

Alphanumeric

10. Bluff : http://bluff.jcoglan.com/

Bluff

Admittedly, a couple of these are not jQuery plugins after all, but never-the-less, they’re doing pretty well.

Observations

• Alot of these are around charting or graphing.
• Sexy-Combo is right up there, see this post for more on that. Although this should be high up due to the nature of the popularity of that article around how “Sexy Sells”
• Interestingly, the Top 10 articles where I reviewed the charting plugins isn’t way way up there in the stats Vs other Top 10s.
• I hope the developers of these plugins appreciate the traffic I am driving to their sites

Last week I posted an article titled “Sexy Sells – I Have the Stats to Prove It“. In that article I discussed the use of the word “Sexy” in the name of a jQuery Plugin, which looking at the stats, appeared to get a distinct number of click throughs compared to the others on the page. I argued that despite the dull looking screenshot, the inclusion of “Sexy” in the name grabbed a lot of attention from visitors.

Arguments against this were many. Some stated that perhaps because the screenshot I posted didn’t really show the “features” of that plugin, more people were intrigued in clicking through to see what it is all about. Others said I was just downright wrong – fair enough. Hopefully this article will sway the non-believers.

Blog Stats

Without going into too much of the detail on exact numbers, on a daily basis my blog gets well into the thousands of visits/pageviews. I’ve had what I would have called many successful articles whereby I’ve seen a significant spike in traffic, well received on social news sites, as well as some exceptional retweeting on Twitter.

That was, until I posted the “Sexy Sells” article. Every social media site that this article was featured on went nuts (bar Digg). I have never seen anything like it. In the first 6 hours, I had a steady 200 concurrent users at any given time which previously I had reached a lofty 75 before.

This time though, I wasn’t posting screenshots, I was doing exactly as the article suggest – including the word “Sexy” in the title. This is what happened:

Stats for the past 30 days

Here you can clearly see the day I posted the article, and the following day. I received something like 400% over my most busiest day before that on my blog. How did I do it? I included the word “Sexy” in the title, and sparked a pretty keen debate.

A Closer Look at the Last Week

This clearly shows that in fact it has pretty much nothing to do with the content that the word “Sexy” relates to. People will pretty much click it anyway. In fact, many users freely admitted that they clicked the link simply because it had “Sexy” in the title. Whether that converts to buyers, regular users, whatever is up for debate. I certainly noticed a sharp uprise in ad revenue on those two days, however that is to be expected really – it was nothing that wasn’t out of line with the uprise in visitor numbers.

Let the graph above put the debate to bed – “Sexy” will get you eyeballs! It may however, not get you conversions!

Learning jQuery 1.3	Amazon Kindle 2	jQuery UI 1.6

Regular readers of my blog will note that a staple of the articles I produce on here include roundups of Top X jQuery Plugins. I’ve done these for form usability, charting, Google APIs and most recently for HTML Dropdowns. The format is pretty simple, a screenshot, some blurb about the plugin, and usually a code snippet on how to implement, with download links.

Usual behavior by users is quite predictable. Plugins in the top positions, 1-5 or 6 get the most click throughs, the rest usually tails off, as we can see from my Clicky Web Stats in the chart below:

Example Stats from a previous Top 10 Article

Yet in my HTML Dropdowns article things were different – very different.

Sex Sells

So its a given in this day and age that sex sells – we all know that. However usually we presume that to be a busty brunette holding an iron or something equally strange. We don’t usually associate it with textual sex-marketing. My Dropdowns article has proven that in fact, you don’t need a good looking humanoid to sell your product, it can look pretty lame, just name it right.

The Preview

Sexy-Combo Plugin Preview

The plugin itself I didnt find that interesting visually. It was a tough one to sum up in a screenshot, so the best I could do was take a screenshot of the dropdown in action. As you can see, it’s not all that engaging compared to some of the others featured. What’s different about this plugin is it’s name – “Sexy Combo” (link). Here’s the stats:

Stats for my article featuring "Sexy Combo"

As you can see, the stats say it all. Just by simply naming this plugin “Sexy” has driven far more traffic to their site than any of the other plugins I featured – around 25% more than the second most popular. In fact, I could have probably gotten away with not featuring a screenshot at all, as the one I did feature was pretty meaningless in the first place.

Conclusion

So what do we take out of this? Well, quite simply – you don’t need a piece of UI brilliance to draw in the punters – just give it a sex-orientated name, something like “Sex Kitten jQuery Plugin”, it’s guaranteed to get eyeballs!