Timeline

[admin]

This is the thread for asking more details about the Timeline proposal.

[Yestin]

Hi all,
In my point of view,there are several key points on implementing such proposal: Unit and graduation, Speed controller, Tooltip, Movie creation. I think movie creation is less important than the other three features.

I think there are two ways to implement the tooltip.
One way to implement such feature is taking tooltip as a tool (using Tool API). Because move is not contained in Tools' SPI, I want to implement a MouseMoveEventListener. So that if mouse moves to a node, the tooltip displays. But I cann't access the drawing class out of Visualization Module.

The other way to implement it is drawing the tooltip when selection changes, this can be done inside Visualization Module. A tool will be implemented to configure some options, such as whether to show, what to show, etc. I'm afraid such solution might disturb other implementation of proposals.

Do you have any suggestions?

ADD:
The movie creation might have the same problem. if I create video, I have to firstly create current image/buffer. But the related class/package is not public, such as GraphDrawable. Am I right?

[admin]

Hi,

Could you give more infor on what would be the Tooltip features, and how it is related to the Timeline?

[Yestin]

Hi,

Could you give more infor on what would be the Tooltip features, and how it is related to the Timeline?

Hi Seb,
Tooltip is the same as what we always said. When mouse move to the top of one node, tooltip shows the information of the node.

未命名.PNG (16.36KiB)Viewed 38788 times

In fact, tooltip is not related to the timeline feature. I think about the way of implementing it because I saw the official document of the proposal contains "A better tooltip":-)

[apatriarca]

Since the visualization module will be hopefully completely rewritten during this summer, I think it may be a waste of time to implement a better Tooltip feature in the current visualization engine. It may be considered as part of the new visualization proposal tough.

[mbastian]

The tooltip mentionned in the proposal concerns the Timeline component, not the visualization. Currently, the tooltip is simple number, it would be nice to have at least
- A formatted date when the 'time format' is date
- Percentage?
- The lower and upper interval bounds. If we have [2000, 2001[, [2001, 2002[, [2003, 2004[ and my mouse is in the middle of 2001, display something like 'Betwwen 2001 and 2002"

[Yestin]

Oh, I see. I found I mistook the meaning of "tooltip". The tooltip in timeline proposal is the current date or percentage as @mbastian said. If so it is closly coupled with timeline module itself.
I will change my proposal. I wrote a draft of the timeline proposal.http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/proposa ... unsnowad/1 Except for the tooltip, do you have any other suggestion?

[cezar_1]

Hi,

I've read the draft of Yestin and have got some questions/suggestions:

1) First of all I would like to feel about the proposed sliders. One of two sliders is a speed control as far as I understand. I think it's a good idea, I have tried GapMinder's solution and it seems to work very fine. It's comfortable. However (maybe I'm blind) I can't see the ability to set the begin and the end of the current interval. The second slider is the current datetime only. Do you plan to use two sliders for time intervals or something else? Or maybe you treat the currently selected unit as a time interval, i.e. 2010 is a time interval [2010-01-01, 2010-12-30].

2) "Unit selection" feature is an attempt to implement something like "zoomable viewframe" proposed by jbilcke combined with timeformat setting, isn't it? What do you think about using mouse scroll? We would have got "major" units and "minor" units and they would change depending on the current scroll (smth similar to movies/audio editing programs).

3) We should really have got a feature which would let users to set time intervals using, for instance, calendars. What do you think? I understand that this feature is not necessary if you plan to treat units as time interval as I mentioned above. But I'm not sure it's a good idea. Please tell me if I get it incorrectly.

4) I really like "snap to grid" feature (snap to major/minor units) you propose. But I would like to see it combined with setting begins, ends of time intervals

5) As for the tooltip I think that the things mentioned above (by Mathieu) are sufficient. And this should be easy to do (it's even partially implemented in the trunk from what I can see). By the way, could you update the proposal hosted in google melange (there is an earlier description of the tooltip)?

BTW - It's not really connected with the timeline but I remembered that it would be nice to have got in mind an ability to set an estimator which is used for getting nodes/edges to visualize. I mean that currently filters don't filter any node/edge which overlaps with the visible time interval. I think it would nice to customize it, so one could decide either he wants to see only nodes/edges which are included in the visible interval, or he wants them simply overlap or smth like that.

[Yestin]

Hi,
I looked through Cezary's suggestions. Here is my reply:

1. I planned to use current two bricks of the slider to set the begin and the end of the interval (play from begin to end). But I forgot to represent in the design document. Using currently selected unit as a time interval is not a good idea.
2.Just as you said , "unit selection" is just like "zoomalbe viewframe". But there are some tiny difference. "unit selection" is mainly used for drawing the graduation on the timeline. If we use mouse scroll to implement such feature, user might misunderstanding it as zooming the scope of the timeline. In fact, we don't enlarge or shrink the scope of the timeline, we only change the unit, and the graduation of the timeline panel changes.
3 4. Letting users set time intervals might be useful. But maybe calendar is not a proper solution. Current GEXF file support time by indicating attributes "start" and "end", now the attributes support both numeric(int, double) and datetime, not only datetime. In my point of view, if we implement "snap to grid" and "unit selection", this feature seems less important:-)
5. I will update the proposal of the tooltip on google melange right now, thank you for you reminding.
Telling about the overlapping problem. I didn't pay much attention on it. I don't know whether I'm right, we can deal with such problem using the "Operator" filter, we can intersection or union the timeline filter and other filters.

[cezar_1]

1. I planned to use current two bricks of the slider to set the begin and the end of the interval (play from begin to end). But I forgot to represent in the design document. Using currently selected unit as a time interval is not a good idea.

That's right. Now everything is clear To sum up: we would have got two sliders, one for speed control, and the second one for begin/end settings.

Just as you said , "unit selection" is just like "zoomalbe viewframe". But there are some tiny difference. "unit selection" is mainly used for drawing the graduation on the timeline. If we use mouse scroll to implement such feature, user might misunderstanding it as zooming the scope of the timeline. In fact, we don't enlarge or shrink the scope of the timeline, we only change the unit, and the graduation of the timeline panel changes.

OK, I get it. But I'm curious what do you think about zooming in general? Let's say we have got a data source with 200 years and we are interested in studying one of them (using e.g. month interval). From what I understand "intelligent unit selector" would set "years" unit, because other units would cause a "mess". How can we investigate this year in a comfortable way (i.e. not using a magnifying glass )? I'm thinking about a combination of mouse scroll zooming (or some another mechanism) with changing units using a combo box you propose (of course there is a problem with "hiding" bricks, I think that if we zoom too much we should cut intervals to fit the visible interval). So, what's your opinion?

Letting users set time intervals might be useful. But maybe calendar is not a proper solution. Current GEXF file support time by indicating attributes "start" and "end", now the attributes support both numeric(int, double) and datetime, not only datetime. In my point of view, if we implement "snap to grid" and "unit selection", this feature seems less important:-)

Well, we could offer different "setters" for different time formats. But you are generally right about the importance of this feature. I think that cases in which user set intervals like "15 hours 4 minutes 34 seconds 80 milliseconds" are rather seldom But sometimes one would like to set, let's say, 1 hour 30 minutes. What do you think about painting a major unit (the selected one) and a minor unit, e.g. hour as the major unit and minute as the minor unit etc. I think that in such case "snapin to grid" and "unit selection" would be really sufficient (assuming we can zoom, I think it's important). By the way - I think we should be able to go to milliseconds in the unit selection.

Telling about the overlapping problem. I didn't pay much attention on it. I don't know whether I'm right, we can deal with such problem using the "Operator" filter, we can intersection or union the timeline filter and other filters.

Well, maybe you're right. Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with Filters so it's a topic for another discussion

PS. Just my two cents about JMF. I was disappointed when I saw how poor output formats set is (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/ ... 38492.html). But I came to a conclusion that it is sufficient for our needs. Well, Gephi is not a video processing software