MacResearch

Google is on the loose, it seems to spit out one cool project after the other, many of interest to scientists. Although today's news is all about Google's advertised variant of Wikipedia, I'd like to mention another of their new gems: the Google Chart API. It allows you to easily encode chart data as simple urls and Google does the rest for you and returns an image you can incorporate in your webpage.

The API resembles very much the Google Maps API and like the images they generate for Google maps, also here the graphs look stylish and crisp. And because the API simply uses urls to return images you don't have to use it in websites per se, you can use it for all kinds of situations as this nice tutorial illustrates.

Now there are still some things left to be desired for scientist in particular. It seems to be focused on very simple graphs for the moment it doesn't support the display of error bars in the graphs (neither does Apple's Numbers unfortunately), definitely a miss if you wish scientists to be really excited. But it's a great idea and a great start, kudos to Google!