Josh recreated Wordle in ‘just a few hours’
A couple of days ago Joshua Tapley (all-around data visualization guru) published his second public Squirrel365 project.
It was a pretty faithful recreation of the viral, online word game Wordle, as the short clip below shows (yes, this is a Squirrel project).
We have always said “Squirrel allows you to take a spreadsheet and turn it into amazing, interactive web content”. Josh’s Wordle clone is both interactive and amazing but I don’t think that we ever expected anyone to use Squirrel to create something like this. The fact that Josh did says a lot about both:
- Josh’s ingenuity
- Squirrel’s flexibility
Josh looked beyond the more mainstream uses for Squirrel – such as creating interactive visualisations of financial models, business value calculators, or even carbon footprint calculators (as our customer FutureMetrics has done here*). When Josh first mentioned to me that he wanted to recreate Wordle in Squirrel I didn’t think he was being serious, how wrong I was! He said his wordle clone only took him a few hours build in Squirrel!
Intelligent dashboards
Let’s have a look at Josh’s first Squirrel project. Over the recent holiday season, Josh created a stylish dashboard in Squirrel.
Below is a short video of it in action, or you can view the live dashboard here.
You may notice that this is not your normal “put it on the wall and wait for it to go red” dashboard. It is one of a new breed of “intelligent” dashboards which are equally considered applications as they are dashboards. The interface layer allows users to find information they need quickly by using clicks, hovers, toggles, pop-ups etc. Basically all the UI elements you would find in a normal app but overlaid on a “dashboard” view of the data.
This means that it is possible to create content embodying a comment Josh made in a previous blog post about data literacy:
Just as a young child can pick up an iPad and use it without instruction, our users should find everything we produce intuitive. The ability to understand intuitively is the easiest way to bridge data literacy
Squirrel allows you to create exactly this type of content using nothing more than your existing spreadsheet skills.
So even if you don’t want to create a clone of an online game using Squirrel, we hope these projects have proved that the possibilities are endless. Josh’s remarkable Wordle clone is good evidence that shows that you too can add “intelligence” to your Squirrel project to enable quick and easy use by your audience.
Try Squirrel for yourself by signing up for a free account at https://squirrel365.io/try-squirrel/.
Footnotes
Read more about Josh’s experience with Squirrel in his LinkedIn posts on his:
*For more FutureMetric interactive calculators scroll down the page at https://www.futuremetrics.info/
