TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Plot.ly: Matlab for the Web

134 pointsby jparmerabout 12 years ago
I've been working on this tool for a few months. Would <i>love</i> to hear any and all feedback from the HN community and MATLAB/Numpy folks.

18 comments

simonsterabout 12 years ago
First of all, it's gorgeous, far more visually pleasing than Matlab's plotting tools, which still seem to lack a decent compositing engine.<p>As far as UX, I would expect click+drag to move the graph, but instead it gives me a context menu to zoom. (And why is "zoom out" in that context menu? Why do I need to select anything for that?) It would also be nice to be able to zoom into a point with the scroll wheel. Also, the command line doesn't seem to work at all in Firefox Nightly, and is quite slow to respond in Safari.<p>I'm also a little curious how the concept will work out. There aren't many situations where I've wanted to put an interactive plot up online, and I suspect that the online Python environment is too limited for me to do my data analysis online (although perhaps this is your eventual plan?). If I could put my locally generated plots on plot.ly directly from Matlab/Python/Julia, I could see myself sending (private) links to online plots to my collaborators, but I'm not sure I'd pay for the privilege.
评论 #5673469 未加载
评论 #5672149 未加载
评论 #5672204 未加载
rrixabout 12 years ago
<a href="http://mr-mariusz.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-we-failed-our-yc-interview.html" rel="nofollow">http://mr-mariusz.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-we-failed-our-yc-...</a> was on HN a week or two back.
leenyabout 12 years ago
It would be awesome if the graphs enabled mouseovers (e.g. bar chart where you can mouse over each bar to get additional info). Unless I missed something and this is already a feature...
评论 #5672219 未加载
vxNsrabout 12 years ago
Interesting idea, though I just finished a course in Matlab so this seems laughably inadequate. My biggest issue with these visualize tools is that you can't really choose how to visualize things, meaning unless the creator has thought of that idea as plausible you can't use it, I like to manipulate data in many ways and these (socrata, manyeyes, etc) just don't seem to think the same way I do...<p>Edit: just saw the command line button, this may actually be awesome!
edtechdevabout 12 years ago
See jStat for one javascript statistical library that is similar to what is offered in R and Matlab: <a href="http://www.jstat.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jstat.org/</a><p>And Formula.js has javascript versions of all the Excel functions: <a href="http://stoic.com/formula/" rel="nofollow">http://stoic.com/formula/</a>
c0gabout 12 years ago
Make it interface with Python and Matlab on my local machine and export to .ps and I'll give you some money.
etrautmannabout 12 years ago
This looks great so far. I'd remove the drop shadows on the zoom box, and remove the context menu. If you click and drag a box, it should automatically zoom in, and reset zoom when you double click (as it currently does), with zoom out as a separate tool or shortcut.
评论 #5672313 未加载
jfergeabout 12 years ago
I was just thinking about making something like this after finishing my college stats class. I'm not sure if I just don't see it, but it would be cool to add in some statistics stuff, mean, variance, linear regression estimates and stuff like that.
评论 #5672012 未加载
user24about 12 years ago
Finally. I've been saying this should be done for ages[1]<p>[1] Here's a 2010 blog post I made saying "do matlab in JS, make money". <a href="http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/" rel="nofollow">http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/</a>
评论 #5673766 未加载
评论 #5673453 未加载
etrautmannabout 12 years ago
I was thinking about developing something similar, nice work! an extension of this idea to 3D plots using WebGL would be awesome. I'd love to have more interactive plotting features for presenting scientific results on the web.
评论 #5672330 未加载
nigglerabout 12 years ago
Retina macbook pro early 2013, chrome 26. Zooming some of the plots is noticably slow (and zooming out of the Hopf Bifurcation plot occasionally causes chrome to stop responding)
评论 #5672215 未加载
iamshsabout 12 years ago
Cool beans. MATLAB's plotting tools need to improve a lot, and hence i use export_fig.m a lot. Is a Skydrive option in the works?
评论 #5672201 未加载
评论 #5672293 未加载
tschaumeabout 12 years ago
extremely cool, guys! Especially liked the script functionality. Just brainstorming: Do you guys have an API one could use to send python code to your app? Or even get back the plot to embed it in one's own app? That'd be helpful for many other (python based) web apps, I'd think. P.S.: Where are the "Share/Tweet" buttons? :-)
评论 #5672268 未加载
评论 #5672077 未加载
visualRabout 12 years ago
Is there a monetization strategy? Seems like I see things like this popup every couple months. Is there really a demand?
评论 #5672172 未加载
评论 #5672224 未加载
fenivabout 12 years ago
Wow. Great UI! The selling point for me is the ability to simply plot points using python code in a browser.
vnagpalabout 12 years ago
can anybody please explain how to plot in it using python i tried example<p>x=[5,7,9,3,1,8,12] y=[3,7,6,1,7,11,8] plot(x,y)<p>after clicking the button "Run" its not doing anything
jparmerabout 12 years ago
Thoughts?
评论 #5671971 未加载
评论 #5672141 未加载
评论 #5672834 未加载
评论 #5672607 未加载
评论 #5672210 未加载
评论 #5672211 未加载
jopofabout 12 years ago
It seems more like gnuplot than matlab. Can I write matlab code?
评论 #5672855 未加载
评论 #5673560 未加载