[ghoti]

I've spent the last few nights hacking up a little visualization of the iTunes Billion Songs Countdown. The data is collected by a little script that fetches the XML file that the AJAX scripts use to show an animated counter on Apple's pages. I only started collecting that data last weekend, but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

Linky to the Visualization.

It's a Java applet, and it needs 800x600 pixels of space. It's not perfect, and there are a lot more things I would like to add. But I wanted to get this out before the billion is hit . I would appreciate any feedback, especially regarding any bugs, of course.

What you can do right now is change the amount of time that is displayed at the same time, and scroll around in the last week or so of data. On the right, there are two scales, one for the rate of sales (sales/minute) and the other for the total number of sales (which is shown with the purple area in the background). The changes in background color show when another 100,000 step was taken. You can see how the small spikes in sales coincide with the 100k steps quite nicely.

The script fetches new data every five minutes, so reloading more often than that will not be of any use (the next version will also have a reload button). It also does a very crude prediction of when the billionths song will be purchased, but I don't show that right now - it's just too primitive. My prediction is that the billionth song will be purchased Tuesday night (prolly before midnight EST), in case anybody cares.

Anyway, check it out and tell me how you like it!

[alschmid]

I only get "Error reading data." in big red letters...

[T-Man]

Works for me...it could be interesting.

[Paul]

nice job, I have been waiting for one of these so I can time when I will make my purchase. It would be nice if there was some idea of the time of day on the X-axis. Maybe every 6 hours noted?

[ghoti]

alschmid, can you try again? This may have happened because the server script updated the file directly, and it was possible for you to read the file at the exact time when it was being written to. This is changed now, so there should be no more errors.

Paul, every six hours the color of the "time bar" changes. I didn't want to waste too much space with the time axis. I will play with the colors a bit to make it more apparent which time of day it is. I also wanted to have five time bars, one for each of MET, GMT, EST, PST, and JST, but I'm not sure I'll be able to do that without wasting half the display.

[alschmid]

Originally Posted by ghoti alschmid, can you try again?

Strangely enough, I still get the error in Firefox as well as in Safari...

[Brad]

Try clearing your Java cache.

Use /Applications/Utilities/Java/Java 1.4.2 Plugin Settings.app to do that.

[ghoti]

Okay, new version. This one now includes a bit more interaction, you can click and drag in the graph and see the values displayed on the scales and as numbers at the bottom.

iTunes Billion Song Countdown Visualization

I'd appreciate any feedback, especially if it doesn't work for you. If it looks like before in your browser, you may have to use Brad's tip for clearing your Java cache (restarting FireFox also works, if it stubbornly refuses to reload the .jar file).

alschmid, the changes I described were purely on the server side. I'm surprised that you're getting this error. If the program could not establish the connection, you'd get a different one. Are you using a proxy? Does anybody else see this error?

[ghoti]

Alrighty, new version! Now works even when you're in a non-English locale! Thanks alschmid and my gf for debugging hints

Another linky for those who are too lazy to scroll up