9m has taken a hiatus from the hustle and bustle (and smog) of NYC this month. We traded it for 5 weeks in Breckenridge, Colorado, trying to find the perfect balance of snowboarding, coding, and skiing. While not all of us are experienced boarders or skiers, I think it's pretty safe to say we've all been having a pretty kickass time out here.

Normally this late in the year Breckenridge would have significantly less snow than is currently piled up in our front yard, but lucky us, we're getting plenty of late season days on the mountain. But on the days that we happened not to have a foot of fresh powder, we managed to get some work done.

I've been spending some time out here working with Flex Charting. Being my first time even looking at charting, I was expecting something a little more difficult than I found. Seems that all chart types extend CartesianChart which can handle displaying any ArrayCollection of data. Here is an example of a basic chart that takes a small XML dataProvider and displays it in an AreaChart. I modified it to display blank labels on the horizontal axis instead of displaying the year by setting the labelFunction for the LinearAxis to blankLabelFunction.

The difficulty in what we are aiming to do with our charts, is that we need to add the ability to pan and zoom on the charts we display. So to avoid creating something that's already been done, I went looking for some scrollable, zoomable flex charts. And this is what I found:

Joel May over at connectedpixel.com has created a series of customizable scrolling charts in his blog post Big Data Scrolling Flex Charts. He shows a way to display scrollbars on a chart as well as a way to zoom in on large amounts of data.

Another good resource to check out is the Chart Sampler app over at Quietly Scheming. It's got a good variety of chart types, series, styles, and effects. While not exactly what I was looking for, it showcases tons of ways to use what's already built into charting. Also from Quietly Scheming is the Interactive Bubble Chart which includes some cool dragging and panning, but also a somewhat awkward mechanism for zooming.

Needless to say, I didn't find exactly what I was looking for. But these charting examples do serve up some good inspiration. Not that spending a month surrounded by the tranquility and beauty of snowy mountains isn't inspiration enough in itself...