Tools

Visualization Tools, Generators and Toolkits.


Tools for the Quantified Self.
There are a ton of tools for helping people keep track of data about themselves.

(Check out how Stephen Wolfram collects his data, or how Nicholas Felton visualizes his.)


API’s
Seems like everyone has an API these days. Great!
This week, we’ll get our feet wet using Processing with the following:

But there are many, many others. Apigee.com provides an interface to an enormous list!
Links to Processing projects for these API’s will appear here shortly.


Raw Data Sets.
There’s no shortage of data. Insight, on the other hand…
There are many sites like the following, where you can find table after table of information.

Not all of these datasets are super-juicy. But if you’ve got a good sense for poking around, you might come across something interesting, like

You might also get a lot of value from “data scraping tools“, like

& yet another thing which could be helpful is


Data Logging Apps.
Consider the following iPhone/Android app utilities, for their ability to record and annotate the world around us:

  • Counter+: a simple counter (push a button to increase/decrease)
  • Pin Drop: location bookmarking
  • myTracks, Location Tracking GPS Lite, GPS Tracks: GPS track logging
  • TimeLogger (by CostmoSoft): time logger with .csv export
  • Image to Text – OCR (by Ricoh Innovations): capture text in the environment, email it.
  • Word Lens (by Quest Visual): translate words (in the camera) from other languages
  • Daily Tracker (for personal stats)
  • 3G Mapper: maps 3G strength
  • What the Font (by Bitstream): identifies fonts in-situ
  • Light Meter Free (by Clomputing): indicates light levels
  • Sound Level Meter (by Cateater): indicates sound levels
  • Color RGB Meter (by Yali Zhu): provides colors of things
  • Beat Control – Auto BPM Counter: measures musical BPM from mic/tap
  • Tuner!! (by Peter Deelstra): gives pitch measurement for tones
  • IP Address Logger: records your IP address
  • Sensor Data Logger (Android only): Logs data from all available sensors
  • Remember: photos are geotagged by default (GPS info stored in EXIF data).

 

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