Gapminder Desktop offers a wealth of information in the form of graphs designed for teaching and learning purposes.
When compared to similar utilities, Gapminder Desktop has an immediate advantage: a flexible and stable tab-enabled platform that allows users to modify any of the data part of one or multiple opened graphs. With this tool you will be able to change anything from color designations, areas of interest (includes a huge country list), categories or indicators. By defining an interval of time (from a selected year up to the current one), users can play back the evolution of a certain phenomenon (like life expectancy over the past 50 years for a specified number of countries).
I noticed that when creating new graphs, the application may take a considerable time to load. This may well be related to inferior system specifications only (I used a Macbook with 1.83 GHz Inter Core Duo and 2 GB of memory).
Please note that Gapminder Desktop will not enable you to add new values but only use its own; this applies to both indicators and data.
For all its flaws however, the application provides an invaluable resource inside and outside of a classroom environment, for looking up accurate data and raising awareness over modern day issues.
Pros
- Includes over 600 indicators
- Dynamic graphs over an interval of time
- Ready-built set of graphs
Cons
- Depending on system resources, may take a while to initialize graphs
- Unable to add graphs
Apple Mavericks won't let me use this program because it's not from a recognized developer. Hopefully something can be done about that. It's really a great program that I used with previous versions of the Apple OS.