Some thoughts on this future of charting

[deft hands]

Some early feedback:

1. The concept of drawing and binding to data feels like the future of charting - it feels powerful, yet approachable and the UI seems well thought out.
2. Organizing data into a tall format, from the human-friendly wide format needs to be automated. I get why it's computer-friendly, but the computer should be doing the pivot for me, no?
3. It would seem like the steps to create a chart could be captured and canned in a macro/script - so that I don't have to draw a box-plot (for example) over and over again
4. It looks like development is proceeding aggressively (hopefully) and I'm guessing the following is already in the works:
• Moving axis labels from one side of the chart to the other
• Altering label frequency and form e.g. dates 02/11/85, Nov '85, Nov, etc.
• Changing typeface, fonts, character formats, and creating paragraph and character styles 
• Creating color swatches
• Basically gaining more Illustrator functionality
5. Two big use cases I have are to do with automation, for which there's no great solution:
• Have multiple charts organized for a given 'project' - e.g. worksheets in Excel or art boards in Illustrator - that can be saved to individual files with a single SaveAs operation
• And in a high-quality vector format
• Automatic updates as data is revised - e.g. much like InDesign's place/link, the chart would 'know' when the source .csv file has changed and prompt to update with the new data

I'd love to get some insight on the development timeline and roadmap of features.

[John Thompson]

Hi,

Thanks so much for your interest in Data Illustrator. We are very thankful for your feedback and explanation of features that you would find useful. I have just entered them into our internal feature-tracker. Stay tuned to @dataillustrator on Twitter or this page for new releases of DI.

Data Illustrator is currently a research prototype supported by a small, dedicated team of researchers. We are not a typical for-profit product with a roadmap that can be shared with our users. Also detail-oriented features like color swatches and more advanced text-editing are pushed further back in our list in place of features with greater "research value". By "research value" we refer to features that can drastically enhance or improve our users capabilities for creating data graphics (e.g. re-usable macros or re-using data that you described earlier).

Thank you,

John