Fun with SparkLines

by Sunir in Integrations on November 28, 2008

If you have never heard of a sparkline, they are what Edward Tufte describes as “word sized graphics.” Said another way, they are little charts that you can use in the middle of a paragraph. Said yet another way, they are really cool.

Colin Ramsay, who runs Plastiscenic, and is a customer of ours, has created a really fun little application on our API. It displays a sparkline of revenue by month.

It’s a pretty compact way of seeing whether you are on track in your business or not. I’ll let Colin explain what it all means:

Ones in which invoice totals exceed the specified upper threshold are marked in green, and ones which are lower than the lower threshold are red. Everything else is black. To the side of the graph, there’s a numerical readout of the invoice totals from this month and the previous month, again coloured accordingly.

If you’re interested in using it for yourself, Colin has provided the source.

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More apps using the API!

by Taavi in Integrations on June 23, 2008

We now have several new apps that interact with FreshBooks. It’s great to see this kind of work starting to happen!

Andrew finally had enough of seeing people enjoy the OSX widget and wrote a time-tracking gadget for the Vista Sidebar based off of the OSX widget! Not only does our widget provide a place for others to start, but we’re also going to help Andrew make it look pretty.

Joel has written GetFresh, a new way for your clients to log into their FreshBooks accounts in order to pay you faster. For a small fee, you can download and configure the app, then send it to your customers. They can fill in their username and password, and with 2 clicks can be logged right into FreshBooks. Joel’s also included a screencast showing how to configure things.

Remember that the above apps are from 3rd parties, and FreshBooks is not responsible for their content or functionality. We’re just happy that people are building useful things for everyone, and want to share the news with everyone.

If you’ve got an idea for a widget, gadget, app, or script that would make your life easier, all I can say is that there is no time like the present. The API is here, it’s alive, and I’ll be kicking it into shape for you.

Once you’ve got your app running, you can count on us to take notice, and let everyone know about the excellent job you’ve done. We’re rooting for you!

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