History widget

Chris, the widget you found works really well horizontally, even on a narrow screen.
I love the dual scale - when you click on the low scale timeline along the bottom, the higher scale details at the top move smoothly to that point. Wonderful!
And other scrolling is equally smooth. I don't which we could want anything better.
Lets go with this.
If we find a way to provide a vertical option later, that's great, but lets concentrate on the horizontal at present.

Most of the 'events' will be periods of time, like "Oswald interrogated" in the sample at http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/
 
Colin, there is lots of room in the popups of this widget for a brief entry and extra details concerning dates (something we were wondering about),
and it looks like you can add hyperlinks as part of the text in the popup.

Chris, I'm afraid I don't understand the problems or processes you referred to for importing csv files into GWT.

David, do you understand what Chris is saying? - enough to take on this task?

David IB


At 09:42 27/10/2009, Tyndale STEP Project wrote:

Probably, we should aim for both, and allow the user to choose, with a default set in his session/cookie/profile settings...  I agree that a horizontal timeline seems more natural... but we can design it in such a way that it doesn't matter the way you view it, it just swaps the x axis for the y axis.

At the same time, someone can look at layouts with GWT, for the core of the application. I found yesterday that DockPanels use table layouts which is not ideal for fast loading pages, and also not very good practice... Unless what you really want is tables!

Third task would be to load up all the csv files into staging tables and then querying the staging tables to insert them into proper tables with minor tranformations like the uncertainty columns...

Happy with either of these tasks...
Chris

2009/10/26 TyndaleSTEP < tyndalestep@googlemail.com>

The reason for a vertical timeline that that vertical scrolling is more natural in a browser.

If we can make a horizonal scroll work, I'm happy to use that. In some ways it is more natural for a timeline

David IB

At 18:49 26/10/2009, Chris Burrell wrote:

Sounds good. I think we should be able to achieve this in Javascript with AJAX calls back to the (local or remote) server. The zoom may not be so gradual, but it could be gradual in the sense that it redraws the dating scale, and then with ajax reload the correct events/durations to plot...

I found this one: (eg.) http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ It's horizontal though, but then I thought we were basing it on the one in MS Word document.

I'll have a scout for a vertical one online... (it could be we can use the same thing).

Chris

2009/10/26 Tyndale STEP Project <TyndaleSTEP@gmail.com >

 

Chris, what kind of widget you do have? I don't know of a ready-made one.

I'm envisioning a vertical timeline with different vertical stripes

eg for the kings, the left 1/5 would be Egypt then another stripe

would be Judah, then then Israel Assyria, and then the rest of the world

The timeline would look continuous, but is in some ways split into:

1) Patriarchs (ending at the Exodus)

2) Conquest (Exodus to start of reign of David)

3) Kingdoms (David to Exile)

4) Exile & Intertestamental

5) Gospels

6) Acts & Early church history.

The reasons for the divisions is that different periods need to zoom

into different levels of detail,

and because there are some uncertainties in dating at key points

1) The Patriarchs can have different dating depending on versions

(Hebrew, Greek & Samaritan) and also depending on how literally the

text is read (though I don't think we can produce a different time

line based on something like historical vagueness!).

2) The Exodus can be different by about 200 years and the Judges and

Saul's reign have many uncertainties can be jiggled to agree with the

Exodus and the relatively fixed date at the start of David's reign.

5) Many dates in Jesus' life depend on the date of his birth and death.

People could see a different timeline depending on these different factors.

What would be absolutely ideal is a single timeline which we can

seamlessly zoom into,

but if we can't do this, I'd be happy with a single timeline with

hotspots which open up these 6 higher-res timelines

and for a couple of areas I'd like to zoom in further still - eg at

the return from Exile & the crucifixion

The reason for the order of the vertical stripes is so that Israel

can be seen on something of a journey.

I've attached a pic which shows the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

The Bible characters would be bold and stand out, but the separate

nations would also have kings of their own.

If we follow this kind of plan, the display should perhaps be based

on graphical images with hotspots

- ie it doesn't need to be generated by the data

If we have something which is data-generated, we should probably aim

for something much conventional like a simple vertical timeline

What do you think - is the geographical + historical timeline achievable?

David IB

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Posted By Tyndale STEP Project to Tyndale STEP - Programming on 10/26/2009 08:39:00 AM

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Posted By Tyndale STEP Project to Tyndale STEP - Programming on 10/27/2009 02:42:00 AM