» Archive for November, 2008

What’s up with Graphsy

Friday, November 7th, 2008 by Max

Just wanted to drop a line about a new features I’ve been working on.  It’s not on the list of requested features, but I think it’s pretty cool none-the-less.  I wanted to create controls that would allow for simple animations of graphs.  Something where nodes can be rearranged to demonstrate a point.

The impetus for this feature came from wanting to write a post clustering and how it relates to software engineering.  I wanted to use Graphsy for illustrations, and then thought about using animations to demonstrate clustering.  Clustering and animations are a very natural fit, but Graphsy did not have that available.  So I figured I would create it.

As I started implementing the features I realized that it is going to be a bit more work than I originally thought.  A few things in the low levels needs to be changed to make room for it.  And, as I was creating it, the interface I wanted to use for it changed as well.  The feature has morphed from something really simple to something a bit more powerful, but hopefully still as simple to use.  I’m about half way there right now.  I’ve crossed most of the major hurdles already and can create some very basic animations.  What’s left is cleaning up the UI, adding build in and build out animations, and creating a player available in the embedded version of the graphs.

I hope to finish this in the next two to three weeks.  With a post about the features will also come a post about clustering to demonstrate the usefulness of Graphsy.  I hope people don’t mind me going off the path, but I really want to get Graphsy to a point where I use it as my main graph creation/editing tool.  It’s not there yet, hence the alpha and not beta, but hopefully it’ll get there in the next few months.