Future stability of Gephi

[Gerenuk]

Hi!

I'm looking for a tool to do some social network analysis, maybe little presentation or even giving the tool to my colleagues to play around. Gephi looks like a fantastic tool with many interesting features. Unfortunately, the current beta crashes quite often on Windows and some features seem buggy (e.g. not all node attributes accessible if there are too many).

Is any estimate possible about the development of the stability of Gephi? Maybe you know when a stable version is to be expected based on the current developing power and outstanding work? I just would like to get a picture whether I can rely on Gephi soon Occational crashes are not the issue, but it would be quite a hassle if my colleagues want to explore the network, need results, but some bug is hindering them.

Bernd

[eduramiba]

Hi Bernd,
Thanks for the feedback.
We are currently working on making implemented features stable.
You can help us by reporting in github the most common bugs that you find. https://github.com/gephi/gephi
And what kind of crash do you mean? Gephi closes unexpectedly?

About the attributes not available, it is done for usability when there are too many columns, but you can select the columns with the lightbulb button icon in data lab.
Horizontal scroll would be an option but while it works well in edges table (JXTable), it doesn't in nodes table (we use netbeans Outline table, which supports tree structure for the rows). This Outline table has some known bugs so we might change it in the future if we find other good tree-table implementation.

Also, soon we will deploy some updates and fixes for 0.8.1 beta.

Eduardo

[Gerenuk]

Thanks a lot for the quick response!
I will consider reporting bugs if they occur (sometimes the network disappears for a moment, clicking on preview resizes the gephi window and switches monitors, special characters in the attribute in gexf can break the parser, ... )
Yes, Gephi beta did close unexpectedly, but maybe it was due to a missing Java update.
As for the data laboratory attributes, I had missed the light bulb. Instead I had right clicked the table and couldn't see the other attributes. That was confusing.
Also the data laboratory table's width adjustment isn't nice if you have many field of varying length.

Is there a place to report small usability ideas (once I've got to know Gephi a bit more)?
Where is the best place to ask about questions which are hard to judge at start? In particular I mean the possibilities and ease of writing new plugins to extend the functionality.
Where can I ask if I wonder whether small features are possible, like tooltips for nodes or custom icons for nodes?

Thanks for the help! I hope Gephi turns out to be the most suitable tool for all use cases of my work

[eduramiba]

We have a list of ideas in the wiki wiki.gephi.org/index.php/Ideas but I suggest you to explain your ideas and ask for features in the forum.

Maybe the lightbulb icon could be more noticeable but the toolbar space is already limited Currently the icon changes if any column is hidden, but I am thinking about adding an initial warning dialog.

Eduardo