When we talk numbers, people just watch us with a "Aha!" or the "Aww!" face, depending on the situation. Even though, number crunching and accounting was my breakfast, during the college days, I never really considered it as a profession. There were times during my internship that I felt it hard to make a person understand that he is losing money to income tax and other taxes. Microsoft Excel came to the rescue soon and we could show stuff using charts and formulae that could calculate effects of the investments we make etc.
These days, we pickup real time data from all across the world, display it, perform calculations, distribute them to users living around the world over a wide variety of devices. These applications are not only graphically rich, they are also interactive. Data is displayed as innovatively as possible to make users understand, capture and react. Users can also simulate effects by just moving needles, turning a couple of knobs and type in a few values maybe to display the effective result. Sometimes, you really wonder if those "little men" inside the application exist!
Some really cool apps: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/
Being a Flash Platform Developer, my world lies with Flash and Flex. Flex has rich features that can help your data visualization app look cool and powerful. Dashboard apps take a few minutes to create and with Flex 4 and Flash Builder it takes much lesser time. The amount of code you type in is minimal, thanks to the new data connection wizards.
Here's an article on it: http://www.insideria.com/2009/06/flex-4-data-wizards-make-life.html
From Graphical User Interface to Rich User Experience, things have come a long way. As a beginner, I used to hate those old formy looks of VB 5 & 6, and always tried some "skinning". The programming community I was interacting with back then used to mock my actions. Now, 3 of them are Flex developers and they swear by rich user experience! Who's the laughing now, boys? In fact, visualization components (such as the dial component and some charting stuff) I had created for various projects in the past have almost become obsolete. Papervision based visualization has found its way as cat amongst the pigeons.
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