I was an early fan of Google, back when their guiding principle was “don’t be evil“. Their search engine was amazing compared to the then state-of-the-art AltaVista. When they came out with Gmail, I became a fan because it filtered spam so much more effectively than the Hotmail I was using at the time.  How times have changed. Not only is their search engine now about as useless as AltaVista, Gmail has turned into a spam machine exponentially worse than Hotmail. And over the years they have dropped many of their most useful (free) online services.  The website, Killed by Google, has kept track of the nearly 300 services in the Google graveyard. I still miss Google Reader.

Google turned off the Chart API a couple of years ago. I had been using it to create Calcium Phosphate solubility curves within my online TPN calculator. I wasn’t aware Google killed it until a visitor to my website informed me. 

They replaced “Google Chart” with an incompatible service called “Google Charts”. Guessing the added “s” stands for Suckers. I looked through the documentation for the new service, but, like all their documents, it reads like Chinese stereo instructions (Yes I’m talking about their Android Developers Guide). 

Somehow, through all the irrelevant google search links for alternatives to Chart, I happened upon a post on stack overflow that promised a “drop-in replacement” for the Google Chart API. Haha, the graph it created was positioned wrong and there were missing data points and parameters, with little to no documentation for correcting. So much for dropping in, next.

I spent quite a bit of time looking into Chart.js before realizing it was just too complex for my needs. Then somehow I stumbled upon Plotly via stack overflow. Aha, easy-peasy, straightforward graphing. W3 schools  provides a most helpful sandbox for testing Plotly code. 

So the TPN calculator page is now fixed. And yes, I realize I have become that grouchy old man who complains about everything.