Information graphics are visual presentations of information. They are also known as "infographics" or just "graphics". They are commonly found in the news, in subway maps, airport signage, timelines, and popular scientific literature. Information graphics commonly make use of pictograms and other pictorial elements. Charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams are included in this field. Another example is a contour map, which encodes three kinds of data into two dimensions.
An early pioneer of the field was William Playfair (1759-1823). According to Eric K. Meyer, "Playfair began a type of graphics journalism that many did not believe to exist until the founding of USA Today."
Forty-four graphics were included in Playfair's "The Commercial & Political Atlas," which was published in London in 1786. His "Statistical Breviary" (1801) is considered to have the first area charts.
Charles Minard's graphOne well-known infographic is the graphic description of Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow in 1812 - 1813 by Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870). In a single image, the graphic combines a map of the march, the size of the expedition showing the loss of lives, and the temperatures endured by the troops. Minard was important for data maps.
Statistician Edward Tufte is one expert in the field. Effective information design incorporates many dimensions of information into a two-dimensional image on a page or screen. He describes this as 'escaping flatland.'
Nigel Holmes is also notable.
Modern infographics are usually produced with computer programs such as Freehand.
Macromedia FreeHand is a computer application for modifying 2D and 3D vector graphics, oriented to the professional desktop publishing market. It is available in versions for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.
It is very similar in scope, intended market, and functionality to Adobe Illustrator. It was created by Altsys and licensed to Aldus, which released versions 1 to 4. When Aldus merged with Adobe Systems, because of the overlapping of market with Illustrator, Adobe returned Freehand to Altsys soon after the merger (after some legal wrangling, and intervention by the FTC). Altsys was later bought by Macromedia, which released Freehand 5.0, 5.5 (Mac only), 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11/MX. In 2005 Adobe acquired Macromedia, thus returning the Freehand product to Adobe.
A flexible application, it is used for page layout (esp. since v4 which was based on Altsys Virtuoso for NeXTstep and had multi-page capabilities) as well as creating and editing vector graphics for print and the Web.
Its current version, Freehand 11, is marketed as Freehand MX, which shows its integration with the new Macromedia MX line of products, which also includes Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Fireworks.
The future of Freehand is uncertain, due to Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.
Algorithms An abstract program is sometimes called an algorithm, and these are the subject of various areas of mathematics - for example, algorithmic information theory studies the behavior of idealized computers executing randomly generated computer programs.
Development
The iterative process of creating a computer program, and testing, analyzing, and refining it is one definition of computer program "development". You are "developing" an appropriate solution that performs some task at hand, as you may not have produced the best solution (or even a good one) in your first attempt. Those who practice this iterative process are called computer programmers; "developers", for short.
Another definition of "development", in the context of computer programming, is the process of fleshing out the work requirement(s) of a task that you want a computer to perform, creating an approach to accomplishing the task, deciding upon an implementation of that approach, expressing that approach in a way that a computer can understand, testing the suitability of the solution in either a simulated or real-world environment, and analyzing the tests' results. Once again, iterations of the above are often required.
Computer programmers are not always required to perform all of the steps laid out above, but the more experience a programmer has the more involved in the initial steps of this procedure they typically become, and the more critical their skills become during the requirements-gathering and solution-design phases.
The most junior-level programmers typically only get involved in the expression to the computer of the now-well-defined solution. This is called "writing code", or "coding".
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