There's no need to buy this software, and products like MS Excel offer very decent graphic capabilities also. But OmniGraphSketcher has a guiding vision for its development that seems focused on the right kinds of things. The programmer for this product, Robin, recently wrote:
The first part of the vision has to do with quantitative ideas. Quantitative means that scale is relevant. It means it’s valid to say that one thing is twice as big, far, tall, fast, costly, or experienced as another. Quantitative ideas are central to scientific disciplines and an important part of most business and policy issues. Thinking quantitatively allows us to understand and predict how different parts of the world relate to each other in a precise manner. How will higher taxes affect the local economy? How will this ratio of chemicals change the battery’s charging time? How does this bridge react to increasingly larger loads?To read the full post (which is definitely worth a quick read) just use the link below. If you are a Mac-user and are interested in this software, you can buy it at the academic price of $19.95.
I emphasize ideas because quantitative knowledge is not limited to what traditional software tools have focused on: numerical data and equations. Sometimes knowledge is less specific. For example, you might just have a rough idea of how different price points affect the number of sales. Or you might know how a new material behaves at room temperature but have only an intuition about what happens above 100 degrees. These quantitative ideas could be a precursor to a more precise theory, or they could be as precise as they need to be, given the messiness of the real world.
The second part of the vision is communicating those ideas visually. That’s because often, the best way to explain a quantitative idea is through a picture. This is true whether you have data, equations, or imprecise quantitative notions. Would you rather have a table with 240 numbers, or a visual plot of that data?
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