I've always loved the idea of email-first startups as Ryan Hoover described them, http://ryanhoover.me/post/439868.... I love that ChartURL makes it easier to add fancy graphs and charts to your emails! As a product person, imagine the use cases from early prototyping to email improvments that you can make by just embeding graphs and charts as images right in your email message to someone.
Hey Product Hunt folks, maker here.
We built ChartURL internally at Ramen (https://ramen.is) as part of a project to create a better weekly email for our customers. We soon realized there was no good solution for getting charts into emails, and figured that since we already built this internal web service, there was no reason not to slap a landing page on it and let others use it.
After doing some customer development, we further realized that not only are email charts an interesting use case for this, but cross-platform design consistency is also an interesting use case: if you're willing to sacrifice some interactivity (no JS or fancy CSS3 animations), ChartURL can be used in your web and mobile apps as well to provide a consistent experience to you customers without having to learn 3 different charting libraries.
So we polished it up, and now you get to play. Please let us know if you have any questions. We'll be here all day!
@tomsoderlund thanks! Nothing like that is planned for the next few sprints, but since the charting library we use (C3.js) is based on D3, adding a world map option on our end would be just-more-work-than-trivial since there are some really nice world mapping libraries built on top of it.
Is there a specific world map charting library you're a fan of?
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Hi @angilly - neat stuff. What rendering engine did you use for this or did you build your own?
@grmeyer thanks! It's C3.js under the covers running through PhantomJS. We expose the C3.js API and add in some clever workflow on our end allowing you to do the following:
* Store project level settings inside ChartURL.com (default colors, typography, etc... at both the C3.js options level and the CSS level)
* Create "templates" that inherit the parent project settings and can optionally augment/override them
* Create a URL that references a template and only needs to send in data, but can optionally override the aforementioned settings.
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This looks really cool! I'm looking for a solution to combining images of charts into a video animation I can save as an mp4.
@joshuawilluhn we have no plans to move into that space, but I'm interested in understanding your use case a little better anyway. where will these MP4s live once they're created?
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@angilly thanks for asking, I'm working on a data logger for motorcycles, it collects lean angle, acceleration, and speed from the bike. I'd like a video of the graphs with that data playing over time so i could put it on another video from a gopro or other cameras filming the same motorcycle ride. If you watch motorsports you can probably picture the telemetry data on the screen. I'd like to make that easier to accomplish. It's the ultimate moon landing goal for my project. So the mp4 would just be to put into another video with adobe whatever.
I get daily stats emails from every business i am involved with and the CEOs have all heard me say "Can i please get a trend chart for this." Now i can just point them here. Standard issue startup toolkit from now on.
If you only this required no coding it would be priceless. Is a GUI in the plans at some point? The usecase is for marketing people to use in newsletters, landing pages, etc.
@romanzadyrako no plans for that right now, but we did talk about it in one of our customer development sessions. We envisioned something that included uploading a CSV of data and then exporting another CSV with the links for each chart, but as we dove in, things got complicated real fast. I'd love to get a sense for your thoughts around what the workflow would look like. Perhaps share it here or ping me directly @ ryan[at]charturl[dot]com? Thanks!
Edit: changing domain on email address
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