Hope · for DataDesk expats
A successor to the tool that taught a generation to look at the data first — and let you brush one plot and watch every view answer.
What DataDesk gave us
Select a cloud of points in one plot, and they light up everywhere at once. Drag a brush, and every view answers.
This was Tukey's idea made kinetic — Exploratory Data Analysis, 1977: look at the data before you model it. Plots over p-values. Curiosity first. DataDesk let you feel your data move.
And now
The software has stopped. What you know how to do lives in an application that no longer moves forward.
Four decades on, no modern tool kept the linked, brushed, EDA-first way of seeing. You've been an expat ever since.
Your method, your muscle memory, your way of looking — all trapped on one aging machine. When it goes, they go.
The hope
jinflow is built to be its successor — the same way of seeing, alive beyond one machine.
We kept the soul on purpose. The vocabulary is DataDesk's: the Brush (the gesture), the Selection (the live set), the Selector (the filter you keep).
What we keep · the brush is still the brush
shared case-ids — one station, lit in both plots. Narrow once; every view follows.
What a 1980s desktop never could
Proof · aeros
Brush a station on the map → its co-located streams light up → open the measured series. The Selection survives as you move from map to table to chart — narrow once, and everything follows. The DataDesk gesture, reborn on the web, with the units and uncertainty carried through.
Come across
DataDesk doesn't have to end with your laptop. Bring the brush, the linked views, the curiosity-first habit — and set them down somewhere they'll keep working, keep travelling, and keep telling the truth.
jinflow — EDA, reborn. A jazzisnow engine.