Google Chart Tools (and a Pacman Pie Chart)

I’m not sure how I missed out on the Google Charts Tools and Interactive Charts for so long, but apparently a new version of the API was pushed on May 18 and someone on reddit mentioned it. If you’re not familiar with the service, you can generate urls that render static charts/graphs or you can use the Javascript API to do fancier stuff.

I felt compelled to make a re-creation of this famous Pacman pie chart using the static API:

A builder or UI editor for generating the static graph urls is a natural extension of this service and would help casual web contributors use the service. The best tool I could find was Chart Maker—it’s decent, but could be improved by having more of the options available (I guess that’s what the docs are for…) and maybe a color picker.

P.S. - in case you’re wondering, the original charts I mentioned in my prior blog post were actually created using this API, but I had just copied them and edited them using Photoshop.