Today we've changed the charting component we display on game pages. The new chart looks like this:
You'll notice that the dots for each data point are gone. We removed them to make the chart less cluttered for games with long price histories. You can still move your mouse around the chart to see the price for each data point. As you hover, dots appear indicating which month you've selected. The price for that month is displayed in the upper-right corner:
These new charts should load quite a bit faster than the old charts, on average. Hopefully you'll spend less time waiting and more time enjoying the chart.The new chart also does a better job scaling the vertical axis. This allows the chart line to occupy more screen real estate and shows better definition on price variations. The horizontal axis is divided by year making it easier to spot seasonal trends. For instance, Mario Kart 64 above consistently sees a small price increase in September with a larger increase in December.
You can also zoom in and out of the new charts by clicking the zoom links in the upper left.
By default, we show you all the data we have. If you only care about prices in the last year, you can show only those ones. For now, we don't provide additional price detail when you zoom in. We'd really like to support that, but haven't implemented it yet.Some of you may notice that this new charting component uses Flash just like the old one. If you have an iPad, you're probably disappointed. We considered using a chart component based on HTML 5 and JavaScript, but couldn't find any with the features we needed.
What do you think of the new charts? Do you have any suggestions for improvement?
6 comments :
I love the new charts. The more data the better, especially if we get the option to filter.
And iPad buyers know they're getting a "magically incomplete" Web experience when they buy one. Tough luck I say.
Is there plans for a Video game price guide App for Ipod touch/ Iphone?
That would be sweet, especially when I'm hunting for games I can pull out my Ipod and do a quick search to find the market value. Make sure I'm not getting ripped off.
We've discussed an app for the iPhone or Android. We really like the idea. We'll probably make a mobile version of the site first since that would work on all mobile platforms. If that's received well, we may spend the effort to make an app. Thanks for the suggestion.
Well, the charts don't seem to load any faster, as far as I can tell, but I like the filtering options. And I especially like the fact that I can scroll up and down in scale using the mouse wheel.
Cool. What graphing software do you use now?
Made me intrigued to see how well my own data matched up with VGPC's. And seems pretty good, even considering the regional differences. Had to stretch it a bit to get similar times and prices ($50 = ~£30), and my tracking was sparse during 09, but this is what I got:
VGPC vs iGPC
http://inaudible.co.uk/temp/ivgpc.jpg
Looks like ICO's holding it's ground over here more so than in the US :)
@Christopher
We use Google's Annotated Timeline Visualization for the new charts. We don't have any annotations, so have disabled that particular feature
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