Interactive data visualization falls apart pretty quickly if the machine’s specs are not up to par. The last thing you want is your visualization to be slow and clunky.
So when planning the graceful degradation of a visualization across a variety of systems, it is important to put some careful thought into testing things such as the creation, deletion and user-interaction of the visual elements you will be using.
This helps to define on which systems to scale back on visual complexity and maintain the user-experience, allowing your users to retain the kind of seamless control over data that will lead to deeper insights into the pattens contained within the data.
I found this really cool terminal tip online that exports your machine specs to an .html file and thought it was well-worth repeating for all the web-devs out there:
machine-specs-to-html.sh
The output looks something like this: (except uglier, I un-styled this a little)
| id: | aqua | ||||||||||||
| description: | Desktop Computer | ||||||||||||
| product: | P5K | ||||||||||||
| vendor: | System manufacturer | ||||||||||||
| version: | System Version | ||||||||||||
| serial: | System Serial Number | ||||||||||||
| width: | 32 bits | ||||||||||||
| capabilities: | smbios-2.4 dmi-2.4 smp-1.4 smp | ||||||||||||
| configuration: |
|
| id: | core |
| description: | Motherboard |
| product: | P5K |
| vendor: | ASUSTeK Computer INC. |
| physical id: | 0 |
| version: | Rev 1.xx |
| serial: | MS6C81B31612608 |
| slot: | To Be Filled By O.E.M. |
<
table class=”blog-comparison” summary=”attributes of firmware”>
id:
| id: | cpu:0 | |||
| description: | CPU | |||
| product: | Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9300 @ 2.50GHz | |||
| vendor: | Intel Corp. | |||
| physical id: | 4 | |||
| bus info: | cpu@0 | |||
| version: | 6.7.7 | |||
| serial: | 0001-0677-0000-0000-0000-0000 | |||
| slot: | LGA775 | |||
| size: | 1998MHz | |||
| capacity: | 3800MHz | |||
| width: | 64 bits | |||
| clock: | 333MHz | |||
| capabilities: | boot fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx x86-64 constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority cpufreq | |||
| configuration: |
|
| id: | cache:0 |
| description: | L1 cache |
| physical id: | 5 |
| slot: | L1-Cache |
| size: | 128KiB |
| capacity: | 128KiB |
| capabilities: | internal write-back data |
| id: | cache:1 |
| description: | L2 cache |
| physical id: | 6 |
| slot: | L2-Cache |
| size: | 6MiB |
| capacity: | 6MiB |
| capabilities: | internal write-back instruction |
