Edward Tufte + Avalon == Visualization Goodness

I’ve long held the belief that the big deal about Avalon is that it provided a platform for a whole new class of data visualization and manipulation software, stuff that most of us can’t even dream of right now. But Edward Tufte can dream of it and in one of his dreams, he invented Sparklines, a very nice way to integrate graphics directly into a sentence instead of relegating it to a whole other paragraph.

As evidence of the power of Avalon to enable the next-gen UI, Sean Gerety has provided an Avalon implementation of Sparklines. Excellent work, Sean.