Creative workarounds – Windings edition
11/24/09 - Correction - Sergei contacted me to explain that I got it all wrong - Windings does not give all the required shapes (Circle, Triangle and Square).Instead, Sergei had to hunt until he found the perfect font that supported all that perfectly - Good ol' "Arial Unicode MS".
In older posts, I have talked about a developer working on internal Microsoft application who really gives Excel Services a run for its money. Sergei has “starred” in two other posts and after playing for a bit with REST, has come up with a really nice workaround to the limitation of the REST API that does not allow for icon conditional formatting. Sergei instead creatively uses Windings and formatting conditional formatting to convey the same idea. Here’s one of his score cards inside a gadget, minimized:
As you can see, there’s a yellow triangle showing that whatever-it-is we are watching is not doing too badly or too well. Here’s the score-card maximized in the gadget:
This is similar to the Excel mechanism that shows icons for conditional formatting:
I love crazy people!!