10 Infographics and Visualization Apps for iOS

As infographics continue to evolve and grow in popularity, so do the different ways we can view them.  A bunch of infographic specific apps have begun showing up on mobile devices. The functions of these apps include viewing world statistics, infographic design portfolios, company dashboards, creating mind maps, finding new apps and exploring your music collection visually.

Today we look at 10 Infographic Apps for iOS devices (in no particular order):

1. Stats of the Union  (FREE)

(iPad ONLY)

Stats of the Union is a data visualization app from Ben Fry, Fathom Information Design and GE.  Summarizing the census data by county, you can easily explore Births, Deaths, Diseases, Demographics, etc.

Explore the nation’s vital signs―from life expectancy to access to medical care―and make your own conclusions about America’s health. See a stat you’d like to share? Save it as a snapshot.

Stats of the Union is powered by the Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) report, which consists of data from federal agencies including the Census Bureau, Department of Health & Human Services, Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency.

2. Photo Stats ($0.99)

(iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)

A very cool app from Dear Future Astronaut AB.  The Photo Stats app analyzes all of the photos on your iDevice and creates 11 different personal visualizations using the meta data of the photos.  Then, with the click of a button, it will combine these data visualizations into one cohesive infographic that you can save or post directly to Facebook or Twitter.

Create cool infographics about how, when and where you take photos on iPhone. Visualize your iPhoneography habits, learn how to make better photos and show off photo skills to your friends.

3. Discovr Apps ($0.99)

(iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)

Discovr Apps is a great, interactive mind map of related iOS apps, and works as a discovery tool to find new apps.  Starting with one of your exisiting apps, the recommended apps or using the search, the app shows you related apps.  Tap any of the to expand the related apps, and continue to explore deeper into any app displayed on the screen.

The author, Jammbox, has applied this same exploration user interface to Music with Discovr Music ($1.99) to find similar music and artists.

Simply search for an app that you like or choose from one of our featured apps. We’ll show you how the apps you choose are connected in a massive, never-ending map of the App Store, and we’ll give you great recommendations for other apps to download. 

When you find an app you like you can read the app descriptions, check out the screenshots and ratings, or buy it directly from the App Store. You can also share your favorite apps and maps with your friends via Twitter, Facebook or email.

4. Infographics, by Column Five Media (FREE)

(iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)

From the infographic design firm, Column Five Media, the Infographics app is a visual portfolio showcasing many of their designs.  I love the coverflow mode when you view the list in landscape.

We have really appreciated everyone who is staying connected through our Infographics newsletter, and we are happy to bring fresh infographics to you for the iPad and iPhone with our brand new Infographics app, which you can download for free. If you have a chance to check it out on an iPad, that is definitely the way to go for the best browsing experience, but the iPhone version will give you some mobile eye candy as well. This is version 1.0 and there are a lot of new features in the works along with a version for Droid coming soon.

5. The Economist World in Figures 2011 Edition ($0.99)

(iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)

From a collaboration between The Economist and XPLANE | Dachis Group, comes The World in Figures 2011 Edition.  This app lets the user view global data and compare world statistics between countries.

“The process definitely challenged our designers, making us consider new ways to enhance functionality around how data was being presented, while also fostering intuitive interaction between the user and the application,” said Parker Lee, executive vice president, global account services, Dachis Group. “The end result really does put a new face on information.”

6. MindMeister for iPad ($7.99) or MindMeister for iPhone (FREE)

(iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)

MindMeister started as an online mind mapping service that allows you to build, collaborate and share mind maps online.  With the iOS apps you can access your online maps and edit them from your mobile device.  Works with a free MindMeister account, but more features are available to members of MindMeisterPro.

Easily create, view and edit conceptual mind maps from this intuitive app, and then share them with friends and colleagues online. Automatic synchronization with the online MindMeister service ensures that your creations are with you wherever you go. This sync allows you to continue working on your ideas in our award-winning and full-featured web interface, on your own or together with your friends.

 7. Planetary (FREE)

(iPad ONLY)

Planetary is a very cool app that visualizes your entire music library (as loaded on your iPad) as a galaxy.  Stars are artist, planets are albums and moon are individual tracks.  You can playback the tracks from the app, so it also makes a good visualizer.  They even did the calculations to base each moon’s speed on it’s track length, so when you play a song it lasts one complete orbit.  There a lot more behind the scenes information on the Bloom Blog.

Planetary is an all-new, stunningly beautiful way to explore your music collection, available only on iPad. Fly through a 3D universe dynamically created by information about the recording artists you love. Visit planets that represent your favorite albums and control the playback of your music on iPad by browsing and selecting astronomical objects.

8. Adobe SiteCatalyst Visualize (FREE*)

(iPad ONLY)

This only works if you are an existing Adobe SiteCatalyst customer (which isn’t free), but if you are, the Adobe SiteCatalyst Visualize app will allow you to explore your web stats in a handful of different, visual ways.

Adobe SiteCatalyst Visualize enables active data exploration via trend analysis of key metrics. Business analysts and marketers can use “multi-touch” capabilities to zoom and focus on specific data points within the last 90 days. In addition, using a visual “word cloud” of the most frequently selected metrics, marketers can easily add or change metrics to customize the presentation of data. Finally, marketers can easily share the analysis by sending report views via email or connecting to an external display for presentations.

*Please Note: You must be an existing Adobe SiteCatalyst customer with valid login privileges to use the application.

9. Roambi - Visualize (FREE)

(iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)

Roambi - Visualize is a mobile dashboard app that lets you explore different business reports and data visualizations.  You can view data from Microsoft Excel or CSV/HTML data sources for free, or there are a couple paid levels of the Roambi Publishing Service that offer many more data source options.

Roambi is an innovative app that quickly transforms your business reports and data – from many popular business applications – into secure, interactive mobile dashboards, instantly delivered to any iPhone or iPad. It lets you easily view and interact with up-to-the-minute company information – giving you the insight you need for on-the-go analysis, impromptu presentations and smart decision-making. Roambi puts the pulse of your business, in the palm of your hand.

 10. Pennant ($4.99)

(iPad ONLY)

Pennant is a beautiful app that visualizes over 50 years of baseball history (from 1952-2010) with some beautiful visual designs.

Pennant is an interactive history of baseball like none other seen before. Using Pennant’s rich interface fans can browse and view data from over 115,000 games that have taken place from 1952 to 2010. For more info as well as a video preview please visit http://www.pennant.cc

Did I miss any that I should include in a future post?  This is absolutely only the beginning, so expect to see more in the future.

Our Choice: Interactive, Infographic iPad book

Our Choice, is a new ebook for the iPad and iPhone by Al Gore that includes many infographics and interactive data visualizations that the readers can interact with.  Intended to be the sequel to his book and presentations, An Inconvinient Truth, Our Choice brings a lot of the global warming data to life.

Mike Matas presented the book design in the TED Talk video above, and he’s the co-founder of Push Pop Press, a new digital publishing company. This is the first book from Push Pop Press, but they are working to make the software tools used to make this ebook app available to produce more ebooks.

Ignoring the message and any controversy this book will inspire, the use of data visuals in a ebook format like this is a sign of many more data visualizations to come.

Al Gore’s Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming.

Our Choice melds the vice president’s narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.

More than 30 original interactive infographics and animations

100% of Al Gore’s earnings from Our Choice will be donated to the nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection.

The app is $4.99 in the iTunes Store, and if you purchase through this link, Our Choice ebook, a small portion will go to helping maintain the Cool Infographics site.  You can also buy the printed book from Amazon.

The Reality Behind Social Location Apps #infographic

Digital services company Beyond compiled the results of their research into location-based apps, and designed this infographic summarizing the results; Check-In Data: The Reality Behind the Hype.  Released in conjuction with the Social-Loco conference in San Francisco, CA on May 5th.

As part of our involvement in the Social-Loco conference we have done some research to try to understand the difference between what people are saying online compared to the actions of early adopters and the views of the rest of the US population when it comes to their mobile check-in habits.

The results give us a clear understanding of who the winners and losers are likely to be, as well as the types of things that will motivate the mass consumer to adopt location-based apps. They also highlight some of the real challenges there are to consumers embracing this technology.

The data is very interesting.  Personally, I continue to use Foursquare, but find myself checking in less and less because I don’t get any direct benefits out of it.

From a design standpoint, I like the circle clusters, but I don’t like data separate in a legend on the side.  I appreciate that the color-coding remains the same, so Twitter is the same color in each visualization.  I would have included the logo images for the social location-based apps, and connected the data directly to the circles.  Data legends like this make your readers work harder to understand the information.

I also think that the most interesting learning from the study is the comparison between how people interact with national brands and small, local businesses.  However, this is the last visualization at the bottom, and gets lost.

Found on Mashable!

Client Infographics: Wine iPhone Apps

Two infographics InfoNewt (my company) designed recently for the great folks at VinTank.com, a think tank for the wine industry.  Are There Any Good Wine Apps for the iPhone? summarizes the highlights of the data that VinTank gathered from the iTunes Store.  Sorting through 452 wine apps is a lot for a consumer to figure out (intimidating!), so they broke them up by price, rating, business model and type of app.

We took it upon ourselves to evaluate all 452 wine related application available for the iPhone. That is more than six times the amount of wine related applications that was available on our last iPhone Report over a year ago. Each application went through an expansive 20-point inspection that surfaced strengths and weaknesses of their model, UEX, innovation, consumer value, winery value and much more.

You will also notice that we chose do a visual representation of all the data collected, because let’s face it, not only is our attention spans less with amount of content that requires our attention but also because infographics are pretty cool and definitely the trend to display deep rich amounts of numbers, information and data!

The second infographic displays the Top 26 Most Promising Wine Apps, as judged by VinTank.  These are grouped by type of app, and if you view the larger version you can click on any of the icons to be taken to the iTunes page to learn more about the app.

The team at VinTank obviously put a ton of effort into gathering data and evaluating all 452 apps so they could share this information with the public. 

After all that analysis it was clear to us that there were definitely leaders in the mobile space that showed the most promise. It is important to note that some of due to our deep reach within the wine and technology ecosphere, we have professional or personal relationships with a majority of the Top 26 that have been outlined. This however, does not change our view about how exciting it will be to see how all of them continue to improve their platforms and in fact, we excluded many other app companies that we also work with.

The Top 26 spectrum chart is an interactive version where you can learn more about each application and download their app directly should you choose to do so, or if you don’t already have it. Go ahead give it a try!

Even for data very limited to a specific target audience, an infographic is a fantastic tool to make the information interesting and easy to comprehend by the readers. 

Thanks to Paul and Evan for being great to work with.