Flot has never had a logo, and as classy as Github’s Octocat silhouette profile picture may be, we felt that it was time for something a little more unique. If you’ve visited our site recently then you’ve already seen it, hiding inside the title at the top-left corner of the page. Here’s a larger version:

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The design features a simple, colorful, recognizable shape that evokes a pie chart and integrates with the text of Flot’s name. We hope you like it!

We’ve also been busy finalizing the 0.8.0 release; the last major work-item, finalizing canvas text support, is now available in draft form as pull request #935. Since this is a major change, we’d greatly appreciate feedback on our design and direction; please add any comments directly to the pull request. We’ll enter beta as soon as this is merged.

Last, but not least, we’ve just pushed a re-design of the built-in examples. All the pages have received minor face-lifts, with a larger placeholder, cleaner text, and the version of Flot used to render the example (addressing issue #626). We have many more example and documentation improvements planned for 0.9.0.

Flot has historically used a major.minor versioning scheme, with the last stable version being 0.7. With the next release we will adopt the popular Semantic Versioning specification. This change will have several benefits:

• We’ll be able to produce patch-level releases to address bugs outside of the major release schedule.

• Many package managers and other tools already require semantic versioning, so this will improve compatibility, at least avoiding having to track a separate version number in manifest files.

• Semantic versioning provides a clear indication of API stability between releases, so you’ll know when to expect breaking changes.

If you have any scripts or package management tools that expect a version in the old format, please be prepared to update them.

Our next release will be tagged and labeled as 0.8.0-beta.

Here’s a little Flot update as we head into the final hours of 2012.

We had hoped to release 0.8-beta before the end of the year, but we’re still working on a couple of last items, postponing the release until early to mid January. Mark spent the holidays cleaning up several time-axis issues, and we’re feeling good about that implementation.

I’ve been busy with the last major project for 0.8, cleaning up canvas-text support. As you may know, Flot has always used HTML divs for its axis labels. Unfortuately this makes it dramatically more difficult to save the plot as an image, and so, earlier in 0.8’s dev cycle, YCharts generously sponsored a migration to canvas text labels.

Having observed them in real-world use for some time, we realized that while canvas labels are a crucial feature, HTML labels make a better default. Among other things, they can be styled and support advanced formatting that would be difficult or impossible to replicate in canvas.

This doesn’t mean that canvas text is going away; we’re simply moving it to a plugin. Once you include the plugin, you need only set a flag on the plot’s options to enable canvas label rendering.

12 of the 18 remaining issues for 0.8 relate to the canvas-text project. Once they’re complete we can enter beta while finishing up the remaining issues, which deal with the website and documentation.

We’re really looking forward to this release, so we can move on to the cool projects that we have planned for 2013. Happy new year!

Development of 0.8 is progressing well; we stand at more than 50% complete, with 29 issues remaining.

We’re taking a break to share a cool new tool written by Stig Rune called Foddle. It takes the concepts behind the popular jsfiddle and applies them to Flot, providing an easy and powerful way to prototype charts with real-time feedback!

The app presents two fields: one for data and one for plot options. Keep in mind that the data and options must be in JSON format, not raw JavaScript, and the data should consist of a list of series objects; simple lists of values aren’t yet supported, though they may be in a future iteration.

Here’s a quick example showing the sales distribution for the five best-selling Girl Scout Cookie varieties.

Foddle really makes it easy to create and share charts on the web; it’s a great idea, and there’s still room for it to grow even better.

We’ve officially finished the project’s migration to Github, with the last of our wiki pages migrated to our Github wiki. This was a long process, but it has set us up well for all our upcoming development.

This means that we can finally focus on the long-awaited Flot 0.8 release! We’ve assembled an official 0.8 milestone to identify the issues that need to be addressed and track our progress towards the release.

Because we’d like to get something into your hands soon, we obviously couldn’t include everything for this milestone. If your favorite issue didn’t make it in, don’t worry; you’ll notice that there’s already a 0.9 milestone where we’re starting to gather some of the issues that were important, but couldn’t quite make it into 0.8. The broad areas that we’re focusing on for this release are:

• Finalizing canvas text support and moving it to a plugin

• Finalizing time-zone support

• Ensuring compatibility with jQuery 1.8 and all supported browsers

• Improving documentation and examples

As part of the last point, Jürgen Marsch has created some cool Youtube videos that provide a more accessible introduction to the library; one of our goals for the 0.8 release is to update the docs section of this site to serve as a central hub for these videos as well as other examples and resources.

Please take a look at the milestone’s open issues, and consider contributing a little time to solve one. There are only 47 open issues, so it doesn’t take much work to make a big contribution to the release. As soon as all issues are closed we’ll move into beta, with a final release not long after.

In other news, I had the opportunity to attend the first [jQuery DeveloperSummit] (http://events.jquery.org/2012/developer-summit/), held at the AOL campus just outside Washington DC. I met a ton of great people, including several members of the core jQuery and jQuery UI teams, and had the opportunity to work on jQuery’s new plugins site. It was a fantastic experience, and I’m excited to carry what I learned - particularly with respect to our own growing library of plugins - over to Flot.

Finally, we’ve added an RSS feed for this blog, making it easier to follow our progress.