Toolbox/PR3

Progress reports, produced roughly every two months, about the toolbox interactive wiki diagrams code.

See: PR1, PR2 and PR3

Progress Report 3

For start of June 2020

Parallels: Biosciences and Code

Two more of the diagram types are now used for both biosciences (left) and source code (right).

• A keyword in context index; for papers (left), for Audacity bugs (right)
• An objects-on-a-curve display; for cell wall (left), for Audio waveforms (right)

Here are the biology related demos.

New Features

Zoomable-images

Audacity's ruler zooms in steps, whereas this new implementation, and the image it gives a scale for, can be smoothly zoomed and panned.

• This is part of a 'slippy-maps'/'google-maps' style of image navigation that can be applied to generated images to reveal more detail as you zoom in.
• This begins the interface for navigating large biochemical pathways charts.

Chronogram

This is a variation on a bar chart.

• The chronogram is the start of unifying bar charts, spindle charts and cladograms.

Cell-wall diagrams

This 'cell wall' component repeats an object along a (Catmull-Rom spline) path.

• In the demo a schematic representation of a lipid is repeated to make a lipid bilayer.

Image transforms

We can rotate and reflect any component-object.

• This was first needed to make zoomable rulers work in both vertical and horizontal orientation.

Incremental Improvements

KWIC displays

• Now have 'zebra' striping to make it easier for the eye to follow a line.
• Text shorter than the line is now gapped rather than being repeated to use the space.

Tiles Display

• Now highlights the tile on hover

Fixes

• The 'i' icon no longer flickers on a click.
• Clicked detail panel no longer stays around longer than intended.
• On Safari on Catalina the 'globes' plots now use the size Safari gives, rather than the size requested. This works around a bug in Safari that led to weird/distorted maps.
• Fixed: Spurious selection when dragging on canvas.
• Fixed: Dragging stops when we drag off screen and then return.

Recap of 'Combinatorial Features'

Combinatorial features that work with multiple or all diagram types are central:

• The master-detail 'large tooltips' to annotate a diagram
• The slippy-map navigation to support navigation of diagrams
• Rotations and reflections to allow charts/diagrams in different orientations.
• Packing into layouts (Horizontal Stack, Vertical Stack and Overlay)
• Chooser to choose one from several choices of diagram
• Repeating a simple diagram along a path

Lessons / Insights

• Chronograms suggest a way to unify tree based diagrams and traditional bar and line charts.
• Code keeps 'escaping' into special case methods. I need a more powerful mechanism than 'fixing it by hand' to keep the code general.