by Jeb Boniakowski
I've seen a lot of visualization apps and toolkits popping up lately that are targeted at trading floors. However, I haven't been seeing a lot of visualization tools actually deployed on trading floors. It seems that for most people, the most sophisticated visualization they regularly look at is a historical price chart. At the same time, it's hard to think of an audience better suited to visualization products: many traders deal with massive amounts of data, have to comprehend the data quickly, and make decisions based on that data without sufficient time for a lot of in-depth analysis. It sounds like a natural application for viz software. So why are so many of your average trader's wall of screens dedicated entirely to flashing Bloomberg messages?
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by Jeb Boniakowski
In the olden days, most apps—most of the big apps that you really spent hours of tube time in front of—were organized around the idea of documents. In fact, the whole computer was. It started up with a desktop, and there were a series of files and folders that organized your docs. You double clicked on them to open them, and automagically some document-editing application like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop would be launched. (Actually, in the really olden days, everything was screen-based and computer screens could only display one of two colors so depressing they were funny: a sort of putrid green and a yellowish amber, but that era is known to modernity only through the movie War Games and going to the library). There were also little apps like calculators or system preference panels or CD players that were oriented around a single window, but the serious time was spent in document-based applications.
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