InSeason - Local Produce Visualization
Final Project for SI 649, Information Visualization, Fall 2011

Team:
Munaf Assaf, Naim Falandino, Evan Kerrigan, Mary Zhu
{munaf, naim, kerrigev, maryzhu}@umich.edu


!! VERY IMPORTANT NOTE !!

Most modern browsers have security to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. Because
our project makes use of a remote API (FatSecret) this becomes an issue when opening
the index.html directly from your hard drive. One solution is to use the
Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to trigger the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
(CORS) mechanism that modern browsers support. We have attempted to do this with
jsOAuth, but unfortunately because the page is not being served from a host this
does not work. Luckily there is a good workaround. You can start an instance of your
browser with security disabled to prevent the remote requests from being blocked.

For Chrome, you can do this by executing the following command in a shell:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --disable-web-security --allow-file-access-from-files --allow-file-access --user-data-dir=chrome-test

This will create a directory called chrome-test in whatever directory you execute
the command from; this contains a new Chrome profile, so your normal profile is kept
safe. Loading our index.html in this instance will allow the remote requests to go
through properly, so it is important to do this!



This project makes use of Protovis, jQuery, a modified version of jsOAuth, and the
FatSecret API for looking up foods and nutritional information. A spreadsheet of raw
CSV data created by hand in Google Docs is preprocessed by a Perl script into JSON
which is fed into the visualization itself.