Juice Analytics is a data visualization company whose blog covers chart design, analytical applications, and its Juicebox presentation tool.
HN commenters recommend its white papers alongside Tufte and Stephen Few, and cite its pie chart critique and examples as informative.
In general it's hard to know what a chunk of the pie chart means. You get a very simple glance that one chunk is bigger, and another chunk is much bigger. But looking at that chart: How big is Eclair & Older compared to Honeycomb?
That chart is ordered by release; you start reading it at "3 o'clock" on the right hand side, and work clockwise.
Luckily they've labled each chunk of the pie. Normally they'd just have a key alongside it. People would have to match a shade of green (or some other color) to a key to try to get the numbers.
Pie charts do have uses. But they're just hard to read and present information in a weird way.
(http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Chartstip%202.htm)
(http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-charts/)
(http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/)
Juice Analytics - http://www.juiceanalytics.com - Nashville, TN and Atlanta, GA. Python devs, SQLAlchemy
We're the creators of JuiceBox, a new kind of tool for visualizing data. We have a platform built on AWS, Redshift, Django, SQLAlchemy, Backbone, and d3.
We have a small team and a great work environment. There are two positions we're looking to fill immediately.
Data Architect - We're looking for someone to design the next version of our tools and architecture for managing client data.
Technical Consultant - You'll be using our framework to build applications for our clients. Python, SQL and business experience are desired.
Learn more and apply here. http://www.juiceanalytics.com/work-with-us/
IANAL, but this seems ludicrous on its face. The patent app was filed in 2008, and Bissantz has prior art back to at least 2006 (see, e.g., http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/sparklines-in-excel-simplicity-itself/).
However, my half-assed OpenOffice version (http://joeganley.com/2008/10/sparklines-in-openoffice-calc.html) postdates the patent app. It would amuse me if I were in violation of a Microsoft patent.
The landing page provides very little information to be honest. I found the examples in the blog writings to be more informative and illustrate the workflow better: https://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing
I also wonder to what extent this could offer more things than things like Tableau. The looks are different I agree, but the general functionalities seem very similar.
I did an analysis on this a while back that told the same story, there is a blog post that includes a nice visualization of the share of travel search categories across the companies mentioned in the article:
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/search-competition-travel-sites/
Direct link to the chart
http://media.juiceanalytics.com/images/pattern_comparison.png
Looks. That's all. Pie Charts are terrible for comparing anything because of the way the brain understands and interprets shapes, length, and size as a quantity.
Someone came up with pie-charts a while back, others thought it looked cool, and it unfortunately stuck around.
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-charts/