HippoDraw offers an interactive data analysis environment with various tools and features.
One of the most remarkable features of HippoDraw is the Inspector, a dialog window that facilitates highly interactive controls on the data plots. The user can easily change the width of the bins of a histogram, and the histogram plot is re-displayed many times per second. It also offers a range of available controls, which can be accessed under Inspector Controls.
Using a data source that is typically an NTuple, users can make various visual plot types that are usually placed in a Canvas Window. Users can quickly perform easy data analysis tasks with the HippoDraw Inspector, and more complex tasks can be achieved with the Python extension modules provided, which allow manipulation of data representations as if they were Python objects.
HippoDraw's C++ library supports building custom applications in either C++ or Python. It comprises over 100 classes with around 50K lines of source code. However, the compiled code of the core library is relatively small, less than 2 MB without debugger symbols, and a little over 10 MB with debugger symbols. Likewise, the HippoDraw Qt based GUI library is less than 1MB without debugging symbols and 5MB with. Both libraries can be compiled and linked in a total of 25 minutes using gcc 3.4.3 on an 850 Mhz Pentium 3 mobile machine. The HippoDraw Library Overview provides a descriptive overview of the library.
This latest version of HippoDraw now uses Boost 1.33 and supports the WCS-library. It has also fixed some issues that have been reported.
To run HippoDraw, users must have Mac OS X 10.3 or later, TrollTech's Qt/Mac 3.3 library (GPL/QPL edition), and download links for the required MacPython 2.4.1, numarray, etc. are provided with the disk image or the installer. Overall, HippoDraw is a must-have software for anyone who is looking for a highly interactive data analysis tool with excellent capabilities.
Version 1.15.6.2: N/A