To fly is to be frustrated. If you've been traveling for long, you no doubt have your opinions about what airlines and airports are the biggest sources of suffering. Whether it is weather delays, getting stuck on the tarmac due to air traffic, maintenance problems, or missing a connection, it all feels outside of your control.

But a little knowledge can help. The Bureau of Transportations has maintained a giant database of air traffic information for decades of flights -- point of origin, flight times, flight delays, type of delay, etc. It is 72 gigabytes of data...just the type of data that needs some visualization. JuiceKit to the rescue.

We've put together a pair of visualizations that can make this data accessible to your average non-data-monkey traveler:

• Treemap uses size to represent the number of flights by airline and by point of origin. The color is used to show delay time -- we've got all sorts of delay metrics, each of which tells an interesting story.

• US map uses size to represent the number of flights and the color to display delay time. Filtering by airline yields additional details.

There are some interesting insights that pop-out when you build a visualization this data.

• The different airline strategies are quickly apparent in the treemap. Hub-and-spoke airlines (Delta, Continental) have one or two dominant boxes (origin location), surrounded by lots of small locations. A point-to-point airline like Southwest looks entirely different with lots of similarly sized boxes.

• Flipping between delay types uncovers some unexpected results. For example, you might expect weather delays to be heavily correlated by airport. The data shows something a little different: Comair appears to be abnormally impacted by weather delays -- as if a dark cloud chases around their airplanes. While Comair might be overstating weather delay data to prevent paying for meal vouchers, a more reasonable Wikipedia investigation suggests that Comair flies smaller weather-susceptible Bombardier airplanes.

A few details about this demo for our technical audience:

For those of you following JuiceKit development, this is a demo of some of the newer features available in our open source Juicekit 1.2 distribution, and some of the features that will be coming to the 1.3 version. Treemap styling is now elegant, crisp, and allows for white borders, fixing a couple rendering bugs. There is a new tree-level depth feature that can make it easier to navigate treemaps with lots of layers. The airports map demonstrates a geographic layout built using GeoLayout JuiceKit and Flare components. A major improvement demonstrated by the airline-selector dropdown is the ability to keep nodes consistent between data reloads. This allows us to animate the nodes even though they are generated by our new LiveQuery component.

About two weeks ago we released the first part of our Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use. We hope that you've already downloaded that document and have found it to be useful.

Today, we're making Part 2: Structure available for download. If you've already registered, you will be receiving this second installment automatically via email. However, if you've been denying that little voice in your head telling you to "just click it", now's your chance. Register today and get both parts!

Of course, all registrants will get part 3 when we make it available in a few weeks. Happy reading!

It's been a busy summer for us here at Juice with more and more companies asking us to help them take their data and create dashboard applications that help them get more done. While working on these accounts, we've seen an ever increasing interest and awareness in proper dashboarding techniques.

We believe that the best software is the software that people like love to use. Typically they “love it” because it helps them get their job done quicker and/or better. This can be for any of a number of reasons, but it’s great to see that buyers are becoming less satisfied with junky information applications.

So, we've decided to share the wealth. We've decided to compile many of the design tips we've harvested from our client projects over the years. These learnings are collected into a 3 part paper entitled A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use (catchy, isn't it?). We've written this to help people who want to create information applications that break out of the horrible constraints of the industry-standards we've all seen and have been disappointed with.

We've made this paper available to folks who we've done business with or who have registered with us in the past, but we didn't want our readers to be left out. If you didn't receive an invitation to download the paper (maybe because you're one of those lurkers out there -shame on you ;-) now's your chance to be part of the "in crowd". If you're interested, register to download your own copy of Part 1: Foundation. For those who register, we'll be mailing Parts 2 (Structure) and 3 (Information Design) over the next few weeks.

We think you'll find it really useful and hope you'll let us know how it helps you communicate your information more effectively.