Final Week

This week I have been working to polish up the interface. I have been experimenting with two features of the interface. Primarily I have focused on getting the two different distortions to work satisfactorily. The Fisheye distortion expands the area immediately around the cursor. The Bi Focal distortion expands the quadrants that correspond to the mouse's X and Y coordinates. Under most circumstances neither produces desirable results because of how it relates the distortion to the tree. The distortion assumes that the tree fills the entire screen, but because the tree only consists of a portion of the screen the distortions alters the tree in unpredictable and often undesirable ways. On the circle layout the effect are good, but otherwise it is only frustrating.


Example of the tree using the fisheye distortion

The draging function is working well and (believe) I also added another scaling function. I haven't been able to check to see if it works yet because I don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel. If it is working and the effect is what I hope it is I plan to try mapping this to the two finger scrolling on the trackpad.

The final thing I have been working on adding more visual cues to the tree this includes adding color coding the nodes to indicate which are active and adding text indicating ranking. The color coding is not working yet, I haven't been able to figure out how to discern which nodes have contents and which don't yet unfortunately .

Future work


Implementing the sizing function is going to be an important component for future work. After discussing design options with the biologist this design was found to be the most satisfactory option. This was because each ranking is necessarily smaller than the parent rank. preserving this relationship that displays the ranking data is more important than emphasizing the size differences between all the rankings.

Week 6

This week I focused on getting making the content of the tree easier to view. This is a real problem because the size of a given taxa can be have 100s of elements. I added "Fisheye" and "Bifocal" distortions to the tree to try and remedy this but neither provided a satisfactory result.



Instead, of focusing on this I added dragging functionality to the tree, so that the user can reorient the tree according to their needs. This is not an entierely satisfactory solution but for now it allows me to view all of the tree.



In addition to this I added the names of the species and made the nodes expandable and contractable. This also presented technical problems which I am working to resolve.

Week 5

The focus of this week has been on getting the visualization to display JSON queries. This has been made more difficult because of a dearth of online resources for working with JSON and actionscript in Flare. However I managed to make some progress. Currently all of the graph layouts seem to work. However, I have not yet been able connect the tree to the intro page I have been working on.