amCharts & amMap blog

You can already purchase Stock chart. If you do this while it is in beta phase, you will save even 30%!

I am happy to announce that after almost a year of hard work Stock chart beta version was released today.

Stock Chart’s main purpose is to display financial charts, however it can be used for visualizing any date-based data.

Stock Chart is a powerful application that lets you forget about most of the boring parts in building complex statistical systems. It has built-in period and data set selection tools, and even can group data to longer periods.

Stock Chart is in Beta phase at the moment. The official release is planned for around 10-15th June, 2008. Stock chart is sold as a separate product, and is not included in the amCharts bundle.

These features will be added until the release:

1. dividends, splits or any other custom events
2. logarithmic scale
3. candlestick/ohlc/line switch
4. JavaScript controls

I will be happy to hear your opinion, suggestions and bug reports: info@amcharts.com

Download Stock chart

We’ve released a new version of ASP.NET Controls for amCharts with support for new features found in 1.5 releases of amCharts.

Download ASP.NET Controls for amCharts 1.5.0 here.

As you may have noticed we’ve also unified major version numbers of amCharts and ASP.NET Controls in order to eliminate confusion. From now on version numbers of ASP.NET Controls will correspond to implemented functionality of amCharts.

Here’s a complete change log for this release:

1. FEATURE ADDED: Legend entries can be aligned to left/center/right (LegendAlign property)
2. FEATURE ADDED: you can add custom menu items to Flash’s context menu and control default items.
3. FEATURE ADDED: Guides. Guides are straight lines drawn through all plot area at a given value. Can also be filled with color
4. FEATURE ADDED: you can set series from which category values will be displayed
5. FEATURE ADDED: LegendReverseOrder to reverse order of legend items
6. FEATURE ADDED: Gradient Colors. All charts: BackgroundGradientColors, PlotAreaBackgroundGradientColors (except pie), LegendGradientColors, ErrorMessagesBackgroundGradientColors; Line&Column: guides FillGradientColors; Line: graph FillGradientColors, ScrollerGradientColors, ScrollerBackgroundGradientColors
7. FEATURE ADDED: all Top and Left settings could now be set in percents (field type changed to Unit), Width of labels and legend could be set in percents (field type changed to Unit), Top and Left distances could be measured from the opposite sides (right and bottom) set properties named XxxLeftMeasuredFromRight and XxxTopMeasuredFromBottom to activate this mode
8. FEATURE ADDED: PieChart: all radii can be set in percents
9. CHANGE: PieChart: new defaults: PieLeft=50%, PieTop=45%, PieRadius=25%, StartAnimationRadius=500%, PullOutRadius=20%

Version 1.5.0.0 of all charts was released today. You will be surprised how many new features this version has!

FEATURES

New features supported by all charts:

1. Data in settings file
   Data can be set in settings xml file too - both CSV and XML. This allows you to have one file for everything.
2. Set positions in percents and from the opposite side
   Label and legend positions (x and y) can be set in percents now. You can also set x from the right and y from the bottom (just add "!" before the number, for example: <x>!20</x>. Label and legend width can be set in percents too.
3. Customize right click menu
   Right click menu can be fully customized. You can add your own menu items which will call custom JavaScript functions.
4. Append data
   Instead of reloading full data file, you can append data now. You can also remove some data from the beginning. This will save you a lot of loading time and bandwidth. New function flashMovie.appendData(data, remove_count) was added.
5. Gradient fills
   You can fill background, plot area, legend and some other objects with gradients now.
6. Align legend entries
   Legend entries can be aligned to the left, center or right.

New Line chart features

1. Horizontal lines and areas
   Line chart can display horizontal lines at a given values. You can also set start and end value and fill the area between these values with color or gradient. Using this feature you can color plot area above the 0 in one color, and below - in another.
2. Columns
   You can set  relative width of vertical line now. So from now on line chart is also a simple column chart.
3. New JavaScript calls
   New JavaScript calls added:

amClickedOnSeries(series) 
when clicked anywhere on plot area

amRolledOverSeries(series)
when indicator position changes

amClickedOnBullet(graph_index, value, series, url, description)
when clicked on the bullet

amRolledOverBullet(graph_index, value, series, url, description)
when rolled over the bulled

New Column chart features
Column chart, the same as line chart can have horizontal lines and areas

New Pie chart features
All radiuses of pie chart can be set in percents.

FIXES

1. Memory leak problem on data reload fixed
2. Balloons renders html text now
3. A possibility to disable thousands separator
4. Align of rotated text fixed

UPGRADING

As always, all you need to do is to replace the swf file. Check carefully if the chart works as expected. Please report me (info@amcharts.com) if you’ll notice any bug.

ASP.NET
ASP.Net controls will be upgraded during next week.

DOWNLOAD

AmCharts are very customizable and flexible Adobe Flash charts. However generating data and modifying settings on the fly requires a substantial amount of data transformations and XML generation. This is where "ASP.NET Controls for amCharts" step in. This set of ASP.NET controls allows .NET developers to work with amCharts as they would normally do with any native data-bound ASP.NET controls.

"ASP.NET Controls for amCharts" is a set of data-bound .NET controls for generating the code required to display amCharts in your ASP.NET 2.x (or higher) web sites.

Core features of "ASP.NET Controls for amCharts"

- design-time support for creation and customization of amCharts in Visual Studio 2005 or newer;
- databinding to any .NET compatible data source or data source controls;
- support for inline or external data generation and settings;
- supports all settings available in amCharts

ASP.NET Controls for amCharts are distributed under the same scheme as amCharts Bundle: free with link back to amcharts.com or commercial license without the link.

Find out more about ASP.NET Controls for amCharts here.

Download ASP.NET Controls for amCharts from amCharts download page.

ASP.NET Controls for amCharts 1.0 Release Candidate has been released. Main changes in this release are:

1. Type of the value fields for all the charts has been changed from decimal to object allowing for flexible use with various datasource (casting is performed at a later stage).

2. From now on controls can be used in conjunction with ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel.

We will now concentrate on polishing documentation and other cosmetic changes and fixing newly reported issues (if any) for the final release.

Keep in mind that the discounted price for the controls is only valid until the final version is released.

Download ASP.NET controls

A new version of ASP.NET Controls for amCharts has been released. This version adds support for Scatter (XY) & Bubble Charts and includes several updates and bugfixes.

Here’s a list of chagnes:

- added support for scatter/bubble charts
- BUGFIX: font sizes were not properly converted to pixels from FontUnit and having no effect on the output
- BUGFIX: ColumnChart, LineChart: plot area margins weren’t working (were rendered in the wrong place in xml)
- BUGFIX: default decimal separator is "," not "."
- BUGFIX: LineChart: URL data field wasn’t properly rendered to XML

Download ASP.NET controls for amCharts

A lot of amCharts and amMap users asked me whether it is possible to export charts and maps in any vector format so that they could use them for high resolution prints. Recently I made some digging and found that yes, it is possible!

This method requires some additional software to be installed on your computer, so you can’t make this available for everybody; however, I guess, that in most cases there will be a limited number of people in your company who will be using this function.

Using this method you will be able to save charts as vector PDF, EPS or PS files but also as bitmaps – PNG, JPG, BMP, PCX and TIFF. And this will not require web server and will be done much faster when using default amCharts’ “export as image” feature. So I would recommend use “export as image” function only if you need this feature to be public.

Here is a tutorial about exporting flash charts to PDF and other formats.

Since v 1.4.0 of all charts you can have labels in data file (only if you are using XML data format). This is useful if you have multiple charts with the same settings and only labels are different.

Adding data labels to data XML is easy - the syntax of XML is exactly the same as it is in settings file. Here is an example:

<chart>
    <series>
        <value xid="0">Xbox 360</value>
        <value xid="1">PlayStation 3</value>
        <value xid="2">Wii</value>
    </series>
    <graphs>
        <graph gid="0" color="#9FCD95" gradient_fill_colors="#FFFFFF, #9FCD95">
            <value xid="0" description="Click for more info about Xbox 360" url="http://www.xbox360.com">399</value>
            <value xid="1" description="Click for more info about PlayStation 3" url="http://www.playstation.com">599</value>
            <value xid="2" description="Click for more info about Wii" url="http://www.wii.com">249</value>
        </graph>
    </graphs>

  <labels>
    <label>
      <x>0</x>
      <y>20</y>
      <rotate></rotate>
      <width></width>
      <align>center</align>
      <text_color></text_color>
      <text_size></text_size>
      <text>
        <![CDATA[<b>Prices of Game Consoles</b>]]>
      </text>
    </label>
  </labels>
</chart>

Another new thing which is added in v 1.4.0 is a possibility to sort legend entries in reverse order. This is done by setting:

<legend>
   <reverse_order>true</reverse_order>

Download amCharts

I receive some nice feedback from amCharts and amMap users time to time, however don’t have a "Testimonials" page. But I can’t not share this one:

Wow! I must say that your products are amazing!

With just a little bit of time on Google I found your amMap. Of course,  when I first saw it, I thought "Cool! But we can’t use it." Because I needed a custom map of Missouri, I didn’t think your product was viable. But, I kept coming back to it - it just wouldn’t leave me alone! It was way too cool! Well, the more I evaluated, the more viable it became. And the documentation about creating customized maps sent it over the top. Nothing else - and I do mean NOTHING - that I had reviewed came anywhere close. It was very intuitive and easy to use. Well, in a very short time, I was able to complete the project. It debuted on "Super Tuesday" (Feb 5, 2008) at http://www.sos.mo.gov/enrmaps/.

The basis of the project was to provide a series of maps/charts that showed who was leading the 2008 presidential preference primary in Missouri based on party and which counties had completed their vote totals. With the live data we already collected with an older application, watching the maps and charts change dynamically was really exciting! We usually get quite a bit of traffic anyway, but it increased  with the interactive maps! We were mentioned by Karl Rove on the national Fox News broadcast and have been receiving many comments since  about how fantastic the pages were and how did we do it.

Of course, I owe it all to you! I’m debating on whether to continue being selfish and hording you as my secret weapon, or being nice and sharing the info. Of course, in the end I’ll have to share, but I wanted  to first contact you.  Again, thanks for such wonderful products! Keep up the excellent work!

Erica Gage
Missouri Secretary of State
http://www.sos.mo.gov

If you’d like to leave some feedback on amCharts & amMap, you can post comments here, from now on this will be a testimonials page. Thank you!