Zoomable timeline / direct entry of filter start/end times

[Snurb]

Hi,

Now that Gephi 0.7 beta is out, I'm starting to explore the timeline functionality in earnest. I'm mainly working with time-based Twitter and blog datasets, e.g. of @reply tweets between large numbers of Twitter users using the same #hashtag.

In doing this, what I'd really love to see added to Gephi is functionality to zoom in on the timeline slider. My datasets can stretch over several days or more, but I also need the ability to look closely at periods of below one hour to examine how tweet-based discussions unfolded; the current timeline slider only provides a global view (showing the total timeframe at once), which makes positioning the sliders very imprecise.

So, what I'd like to see:

1. An ability to manually, directly enter the start and end times for the dynamic time interval filter - right now (as far as I can tell) the timeline slider is the only way to set interval start and stop values. All the other filters allow direct minimum/maximum value entry, but the timeline filter doesn't.

2. An ability to zoom in on the timeline, to make positioning the time interval start/stop sliders more precise. This could work similarly to most audio editing software: rather than seeing the complete track being edited, all the time, it's usually possible to zoom in on selected sections of the track, which can then be edited with more precision. So in Gephi, I'd similarly like to be able to zoom in on the timeline slider - if my total dataset covers time values from 1 to 20,000,000, for example, I'd like to be able to zoom in so that the slider only displays the period between, say 50,000 and 150,000, enabling me to set the time interval filter minimum and maximum values within that range with more precision.

Hope that makes some sense - difficult to explain in words alone. And thanks again for Gephi - 0.7 beta is a major step forward already !

Axel Bruns

[jbilcke]

Hi,

thanks you Snurb !

I propose to talk about future timeline improvements in a dedicated thread, which I created there : http://forum.gephi.org/viewtopic.php?f= ... 1688#p1688

by grouping them this it will be easier to keep tracks of the progress, since these features are related together (they all have impact on the same visual interface)