A little green cloud

Continued investigations with Excanvas/Canvas, JavaScript, etc...

Here's a link to the latest: a simple 3d point cloud viewer using Excanvas.

A few observations...

This little viewer renders a lot faster in FireFox than it does in IE7 on my laptop. I have yet to try it in Safari. The impetus behind this is mostly curiosity regarding performance, proof of concept--and a desire for something quick and dirty (i.e., hacky like I'm-not-getting-paid-for-this) to serve as a basis for simple 3D visualizations (should I ever get around to some posts on least squares, principal component analysis, dimensionality reduction, etc).

I've run into a few problems with ExplorerCanvas in the area of errant or non-existent support for gradient fills, but it does work well enough to easily produce decent mathematical visualizations without going to Flash (and ones that look better than many of visualizations typically done with Java).

I've heard SVG support has been improving in Safari. Given that, I'm may spend a little time poking around for some common vector classes built on top of SVG/VML.

link