Jon Udell posted an article lamenting the fact that data visualization is currently static. He argues that creating animated graphs is far more difficult than it should be. I run into this issue frequently in my research. I normally have a ton of data that is completely useless to me without some kind of processing. The most powerful tool I have is GnuPlot, plus some scripts I have hacked up myself. There have been times where I've been tempted to try and whip up a PyObjC application to interactively investigate data on my Mac. I think there could be a pretty good market for a tool that made it easy to create useful visualization and exploration tools. Unfortunately, I think that finding a way to make it easy is a very challenging problem.