21–30 of 47 posts
Does anybody know (or is anyone willing to guess) whether the force-directed-layout is done by some available library or whether they rolled their own?
We rolled our own physics to get the layout in the node view to a point that felt right.
It reminds me a little of the Web Stalker, an experimental web browser from 1997: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=7
The app itself looks gorgeous, but I dont understand the primary use case. I've been writing papers and researching for years now, and I've never found the little idea cloud thing -- it seems more like a way to connect suspects in cop movies than an actually helpful way of visualizing discrete data.
Indeed. I watched the video on the front page, and I couldn't work out how the application was actually helping the end user. I couldn't work out what the chap with the pins and string was actually trying to accomplish either. Consequently my money remained in my pocket.
We also highly valued the reading experience and put just as much effort into making the presentation of the content better as developing the web.
However, that's not going to be for everyone. It's been a joy for us, and we're simply hoping others will find value there as well.
The app itself looks gorgeous, but I dont understand the primary use case. I've been writing papers and researching for years now, and I've never found the little idea cloud thing -- it seems more like a way to connect suspects in cop movies than an actually helpful way of visualizing discrete data.
Indeed. I watched the video on the front page, and I couldn't work out how the application was actually helping the end user. I couldn't work out what the chap with the pins and string was actually trying to accomplish either. Consequently my money remained in my pocket.
I like it, never seen that before with wiki articles
It's extremely pretty, though I question some of the UX desicisions. Double-tapping an item makes it vanish. Due to the seemingly random selection of nodes that appear when re-searching for a parent node, that item may never be seen again... Seems odd that a gesture like double-tapping, while not often used in iOS, would result in the exact opposite action of the familiar double-clicking to drill down or expand of ot…
Thanks for taking the time to leave some thoughtful feedback. To pull back the curtain a bit, you are right that the nodes that show up when a parent node is tapped are randomized. As you can imagine, many Wikipedia pages have thousands of links which would be unwieldy for both the hardware and the user. For this reason, we gave up on the idea that users would be able to search for a specific page through the node vi…
I've tried a few Wikipedia apps... I always end up not using them since I find Wikipedia pages via Google and there is no way to redirect you from the web to an app. (Wikipedia could choose to do it on their end but they don't.)
How is Wikipedia supposed to know you'd like to be redirected to some random app downloaded from an app store? There actually is a way to redirect from the web to a random app (intents on Android) but that's not available on iOS. Lay the blame at Apple's feet not Wikipedia's.
It's extremely pretty, though I question some of the UX desicisions. Double-tapping an item makes it vanish. Due to the seemingly random selection of nodes that appear when re-searching for a parent node, that item may never be seen again... Seems odd that a gesture like double-tapping, while not often used in iOS, would result in the exact opposite action of the familiar double-clicking to drill down or expand of ot…
Thanks for taking the time to leave some thoughtful feedback. To pull back the curtain a bit, you are right that the nodes that show up when a parent node is tapped are randomized. As you can imagine, many Wikipedia pages have thousands of links which would be unwieldy for both the hardware and the user. For this reason, we gave up on the idea that users would be able to search for a specific page through the node vi…
That said, this is a beautiful app!
For anyone who is interested, I've written a parallelized Wikipedia spidering tool in Go: https://github.com/taliesinb/wikispider It's for when you want to grab a small portion of the full Wikipedia graph without cutting yourself on the 30-odd gigabytes of XML the dumps provide.