Advanced visualization without programming – Impure

Programming can be tough in the beginning, which can make advanced visualization beyond the Excel spreadsheet hard to come by. Bestiario tries to make it easier with their most recent creation Impure:

Impure is a visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial information, images, news, search queries and many more.

It’s not a plug-and-play application, but it’s not scripting in a text editor either. Think of it as somewhere in between that (hence the visual programming language). They’ve taken the logic behind code, and encapsulated them into modules or structures, and you can piece them together like a puzzle. The interface kind of reminds me of Yahoo Pipes.

For example, you can attach a data piece to an operator (like multiplication), and then fit that with a visualization (or a visualizator, as they call it). So you’re using the same logic as you would in programming, but don’t have any syntax to learn, other than the visual one.

While still in alpha, Impure allows a wide variety of possibilities, as well as reads in data from APIs such as Delicious and Twitter.

If you’re a programmer, the interface will probably feel kind of intuitive since you’re implementing similar logic to what you would normally. The upswing is that you’re basically clicking and dragging to build stuff. If you’re not a programmer, Impure will probably feel awkward at first.

Either way, it does take some getting used to. It took me a little while to figure out what I was doing. I would’ve liked to see more visual cues that indicate what each piece does. But maybe I should’ve watched a tutorial or two on YouTube.

Like I said though, Impure is in alpha, so I expected it to be rough around the edges. There’s some promise there, and Bestiario has clearly put in a lot of work to make it work.

[Impure | Thanks, Jose]