Dashboard

A lot of Dashboard Spy readers have Apple iPhones on their brains these days. With the release of the new iPhone models (3G S) and the price drop of the older 8 gb iPhone to $99, there’s a lot of buzz right now. Personally, I’ve been having an adventure with a “detected but not identified” message when I connect my own iPhone to my Dell laptop but now I’m digressing (see comments below for the work-around that solves it).

Long time Dashboard Spy reader and SAS/GRAPH guru Robert Allison has developed a nifty iPhone dashboard. Take a look at this screenshot:

He was sparked by an image of a dashboard that appeared on this blog, but I’ll let Robert tell the story.

A while back, the “DashboardSpy” posted up a mock-up of a dashboard
for an iPhone.  He got it from BonaVista Systems (it was a graphic they had
used for a contest), and I checked with Andreas Lipphardt of BonaVista Systems
and he says the iPhone dashboard is a “screen mockup”.

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2008/05/05/the-future-of-excel-dashboards/

I decided to try to create the _real_ thing, using SAS/Graph!

How did I create it?

First, I found that the screen dimensions of an iPhone are 320×480 pixels.
Therefore, I set my xpixels and ypixels to those values.

Then, to create the dashboard, I started with a “gplot”, but I only
used it for the haxis and to give me a coordinate system to work with.
I pretty much annotated everything except for the numbers on the haxis.

The names of the “Key Figures” along the left are actually outside of
the gplot axes, and everything to the right of that text is ‘inside’
of the plot axes.  I used a large “offset” value in my haxis to allow
room for me to annotate the red dots, the sparklines, the CV, and
the bar values to the left of the 0% axis value.  I use an angled
title on the left of the graph to guarantee that I have room on that
side to annotate the text for the “Key Figure” names.

For the sparklines, I put 12 variables in my dataset (line1-line12),
and connect them with annotate move/draw.

For the bullet graphs, I annotate a ‘bar’ for each of the 3 shaded
sections behind them, and I annotate a move/draw line segment (with
a wide thickness) for the ‘bar’.

Notice that some of the lines of data have all-missing numerical values.
These are the ones for the section labels, etc.

I tried to write it somewhat generalized, so that you can have a different
number of lines of data, etc.

You can find the full write-up and SAS code for this dashboard here:

Robert Allison’s SAS GRAPH iPhone Dashboard

Here are some images from Robert:

The “mockup” of an iPhone dashboard:

A real iPhone Dashboard created with SAS/GRAPH:

About to zoom in on the iPhone dashboard:

The enlarged view of the SAS iPhone Dashboard:

And here is a view of the rotated dashboard:

As always, Robert Allison has done a great job with the dashboard. Check out his other sample dashboards at Robert Allison’s SAS/Graph Samples.

Tags: iPhone dashboard, sas dashboard

What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.  

3 Responses to “SAS Graph iPhone Dashboard”

1. Dashboard Spy Said on June 19th, 2009 at 11:44 am quote

   So I started getting an error message in iTunes when I plugged in my iPhone 3G a couple of days ago. It would say that an iphone was detected by not recognized and to try unplugging it and plugging it back in again. I tried and tried to no avail. After much struggle, I came across a suggestion to turn off the wireless radio on my Dell laptop and plug in the iPhone. What do you know? It worked and I was able to upgrade to the 3.0 software. I had some issues with that, but now things are ok. I’m keeping my fingers crossed! Hubert Lee, The Dashboard Spy.

2. Anonymous Said on June 20th, 2009 at 12:26 am quote

   It looks like the team at MeLLmo is light years ahead with the RoamBi product. http://www.roambi.com

3. Robert A. Said on June 22nd, 2009 at 7:12 am quote

   Mr. “Anonymous” … and here, I thought black backgrounds went out of style in the 1980s!

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Last Modified: Friday, June 19th, 2009 @ 11:40

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 11:40 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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