1) Timeline:
After a "fertile" discussion we have got some conclusions here.
a) scale/zooming:
I think the best idea is Kdenlive-like solution. Our applicants
provide two similar methods related to this idea. Well, for me Daniel's one is more comfortable since it's "smoother" (I feel it could be faster and easier to use it). It also contains more advanced zoom feature... I know that some people don't like this idea, but personally I think it's necessary. However there is a small problem connected with the slider (a location of it). As far as I remember it cannot be located in the "status panel" (the panel with the workspaces chooser) due to design. The workaround is locating magnifying glasses on both sides of the detailed slider. It could be discussed in the future if the slider is necessary (personnaly I agree with the statement it's much more comfortable than having just + and - buttons).It can be also discussed in the future if mouse zooming is necessary. For now it's just an idea and I suppose not very popular here... so, for the moment forget it
b) graduation:
Well, a graduation chooser is a nice feature and in Yestin's proposal it's necessary. In Daniel's proposal it could be just a feature since it could be intelligently choosed during initialization (as Yestin pointed out) and in the detailed panel it could be automated thanks to the zoom feature.
There is also another nice feature that Yestin proposed. It's "snapin" of course. It's really comfortable and a large bunch of controls like schedulers use it. It's absolutely necessary
By the way: for the datetime timeformat it could be fine to be able to see major units and minor units.
c) precise input:
Well, personnaly I think that people setting "weird" intervals are rather rarity
and both solutions provide sufficient options to set such intervals if someone would like to do it. However we should have got manual input in our minds and the architecture must allow inserting such an extension easily.d) charts:
As Sebastien and Mathieu say, it could be even more important than the detailed panel! However it's not obvious what data is really interesting since different scientists are interested in different characteristics. So this feature should be designed carefully. I think some basic characteristics (number of nodes etc.) could be available in the first release.
2) Movie creation:
There are more doubts here.
a) library
For me there should be an abstraction layer that could make it possible to replace libraries we will use for encoding. And for the first release, I think we can use JMF since it comes up to our simple needs.
b) compression
I really don't know what solution would be better. I think the future will show...
c) events:
It's a nice feature, however not so important as other things. For me it could be done after all other things