Plotdroppy is a very simple Mac OS X "droplet" for quick data visualization. Drag-and-drop one or more text files containing series data and a simple scatter plot is generated containing each series with different symbols, legend, etc. GUI-less Mac alternative to PlotDrop. Plotdroppy can also be used from the command-line, including under non-mac systems, though those users are strongly encouraged to use the original PlotDrop.
Plotdroppy requires Mac OS X (other *nix users can use it from the command line, see Usage) and Pylab, a free Python plotting module. Fink may be the easiest way to get pylab, as well as a newer version of Python. Plotdroppy does not require a GUI backend for pylab, so if you are unable to import pylab because of the backend, you can set it to one of the non-GUI backends, such as Agg. See Matplotlib Backends for more.
Please visit our SourceForge project page.
A short INSTALL file is included with the download.
In OS X, simply select the data files, drop them onto the droplet, and wait for the image to appear.
Plotdroppy can also be invoked from the command-line, and will still open the image automatically (mac only). To use:
$: plotdrop.py file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt
will output a plot of those three files. If you tend to store related data in separate directories, this is especially convenient:
$: plotdrop.py output_directory/*
The plotdrop.png output should be closed before making another plot. If left open, and another plot is made, the file will be overwritten but the open image will not be updated.
The command-line script uses an 'open' command to open the .png file. This command may be different under non-mac systems. To avoid errors, non-mac users should comment out that line in the plotdrop.py file and manually open /tmp/plotdrop.png after each usage.Jim Bagrow, bagrowjp [at] clarkson [dot] edu