Be the Master of Your Visual Domain by Customizing the Presentation of Your Data

Learn how to parse data from FRED, build a series, present it in a chart and build some new visuals to improve the presentation.

Arden Thomas, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, began the Hidden Gems screencast series to showcase shortcuts, tips and techniques that may make it easier for others to use or kickstart their use of Cincom Smalltalk. Arden shares how he utilizes multiple Cincom Smalltalk components, as well as features he uses for his own productivity that he considers “hidden gems” in these screencasts.

MVC, short for Model, View and Controller, is a framework for building interfaces and interactive interfaces. MVC was created by Trygve Reenskaug in the late 1970s as a visiting scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) working on Smalltalk-79. He was looking for a pattern that could be used to structure any program in which users interact with a large, complex data set.

The Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) is a database maintained by the Research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that contains over 816,000 economic time series from various sources.

In this month’s new Hidden Gems screencast, MVC, FRED, and the Economy, we will show you how to parse data from FRED, build a series, present it in a chart and build some new visuals to improve the presentation.

This latest Hidden Gems screencast is part of the Techniques Series that shows various techniques of how to accomplish or solve different tasks from automating image build to creating a custom parser.