A useful tool introduced in Xcelsius 2008 is called the Software Development Toolkit (SDK), which allows Xcelsius designers to create customized components for dashboards that fall outside of Xcelsius 2008’s built-in functionality. SDK uses Adobe’s Flex technology.

What does the combination of SDK and Flex provide in practical terms? Here are some examples:

• Data visualizations with customer item renderers, which let you adjust the display of data 
• Heat maps, which use colors to highlight certain points of data on a screen
• Geographical mapping components that allow users to see a specific site’s sales and profitability (e.g., a retail store)
• 3D pie charts
• Hierarchical pie charts, which show not only data, but the relationship between data results (to see a cool example of a hierarchical pie chart, go to the Carrot² search engine, try a search, and then view your results in the Circles tab)
• Multi-dial gauges
• Data meters
• Bullet charts
• Connections to Google AdWords
• Compound filters to further sort data

Ask your developers or designers for help with SDK if you aren’t familiar with it.

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