Has it really been since April since I posted an update? How embarrassing. It doesn't mean I've been slacking.

 

Firefly is making good progress. Here's a view of the Universe Tab - using a circular layout. You'll notice a lot of improvements in the app: comments, links, synchronized detail and context views and hover over effects. Some things that are not as obvious: a label in the top right corner showing the textual explanation of what someone is looking at. It's amazing to me how important this is for networks (actually for any visualization).

 

 

One of the new items that is obvious here as well is the addition of metrics as mapped to each node. The metrics are represented as circles (really ellipsis, but who's keeping score?) The Size of the circle is one metric and the color represents the other. You can use the same metric if you want to reinforce the value by magnitude and color.

 

Filtering has been expanded to allow a user to look at nodes and edges that contain metrics between value points. This is similar to Edge Influence. You can see the sliders in the Filter subpane on the left side.

 

The detail view is getting better, but still needs some work. Double-clicking on a node in the Universe Tab will bring that point to the center and the display will animate to shows its nearest connections - the Metrics also make the trip.

 

 

Comments and Links are now present as well. You can add comments to nodes (and soon to edges) by right-clicking on the node. Here's an interesting tidbit. The comments and links are persisted by node or edge id in the data store, but unlike the nodes and edges, the overall layout algorithm ignores them. During the rendering process we perform a circular layout on the comments and links as we draw the overall network. The result is a pleasing presentation of comments that has harmony with the overall structure.

 

 

Next up - Voting and valuing connections (edges). Allowing users to add edges and voting up or down their importance in the network.

This Web 2.0 coming to network theory!