It looks more like an application on the local machine than a web application
I think is probably more of a question of styling. I tend to focus on functional first, and then style things up... I can imagine a few different ways this would work better. And I think we probably want to aim more for a web page, since users locally and remotely are used to using web pages.
For eg, I still think a menu at the top, instead of dropdowns with the different module names. And then hovering over those gives you an indication of the level of detail you might want... Or perhaps a second bar down below acting as a submenu... And then the search box could be neatly tied in to the menu bar... I'll see if i can draw something up and send over so that you see what I mean.
For eg, I still think a menu at the top, instead of dropdowns with the different module names. And then hovering over those gives you an indication of the level of detail you might want... Or perhaps a second bar down below acting as a submenu... And then the search box could be neatly tied in to the menu bar... I'll see if i can draw something up and send over so that you see what I mean.
The hover box is very smooth.
Can we use this to add links? - eg "Click to go to Exo.12"?.
Yes we can. We can use it to add anything we like. At the moment it only shows the name of the event, because that's as much as we have in the database at the moment, but I'm assuming at some point we will be having mini articles or descriptions, and these can be stored in HTML or our own custom form so that we link to other articles, modules, scripture references, etc.
Agreed. This was a problem initially for all timelines, so that now we can set a default scale for each of the timebands. The way this is done is that each band is a CSV file, and within each CSV file we have different timebands corresponding to the values defined in the timeline column.
One problem is too much information.
Several ways come to mind to adapt the scale.
- Split the CSV files into more CSV files meaning you'll have a checkbox for "Passion Week", a check box for "Early years of Jesus". This is easy copy and paste, but means you will never have an event on two bands unless we duplicate data.
- Enhance the above by allowing events to be present on multiple timebands, and therefore they will can be on several timelines, but at different scales. Equally easy, involving a bit more coding.
- Enhance the above and imagine a hierarchy of timebands. So overall "Life of Jesus" would be one timeband, but have several children, like the early years, his passion, etc. We can imagine a tree-like set of checkboxes, ensuring that the user knows exactly where to go.
- Making the default timeline appearing at the top. This should be fairly straight forward I think.
- Aggregating things. This becomes quite complicated but would be useful. Not sure how much coding there would be. It also presents various UI issues, as to how to represent things, what to put in the hover over boxes, etc.
On another note, I've got a basic framework in the back-end in place to do scripture parsing with strong numbers, etc. Available for eg. on the KJV version. This is not up yet, and there's no UI component what that will come fairly shortly.
Glad you like the progress. (btw the server doesn't build automatically yet, so every so often, I'll go and do a manual build...)
Chris
On 17 February 2010 10:37, Tyndale STEP Project <tyndalestep@googlemail.com> wrote:
Chris, this is great!
The timeline at http://crosswire.org:8080/~chrisburrell/Step.html
looks really useful even in its default state and it is quite flexible too.
It looks more like an application on the local machine than a web application
I think is probably more of a question of styling. I tend to focus on functional first, and then style things up... I can imagine a few different ways this would work better. And I think we probably want to aim more for a web page, since users locally and remotely are used to using web pages.
For eg, I still think a menu at the top, instead of dropdowns with the different module names. And then hovering over those gives you an indication of the level of detail you might want... Or perhaps a second bar down below acting as a submenu... And then the search box could be neatly tied in to the menu bar... I'll see if i can draw something up and send over so that you see what I mean.
For eg, I still think a menu at the top, instead of dropdowns with the different module names. And then hovering over those gives you an indication of the level of detail you might want... Or perhaps a second bar down below acting as a submenu... And then the search box could be neatly tied in to the menu bar... I'll see if i can draw something up and send over so that you see what I mean.
The hover box is very smooth.
Can we use this to add links? - eg "Click to go to Exo.12"?.
Yes we can. We can use it to add anything we like. At the moment it only shows the name of the event, because that's as much as we have in the database at the moment, but I'm assuming at some point we will be having mini articles or descriptions, and these can be stored in HTML or our own custom form so that we link to other articles, modules, scripture references, etc.
One problem is too much information.
Agreed. This was a problem initially for all timelines, so that now we can set a default scale for each of the timebands. The way this is done is that each band is a CSV file, and within each CSV file we have different timebands corresponding to the values defined in the timeline column.
Several ways come to mind to adapt the scale.
Several ways come to mind to adapt the scale.
- Split the CSV files into more CSV files meaning you'll have a checkbox for "Passion Week", a check box for "Early years of Jesus". This is easy copy and paste, but means you will never have an event on two bands unless we duplicate data.
- Enhance the above by allowing events to be present on multiple timebands, and therefore they will can be on several timelines, but at different scales. Equally easy, involving a bit more coding.
- Enhance the above and imagine a hierarchy of timebands. So overall "Life of Jesus" would be one timeband, but have several children, like the early years, his passion, etc. We can imagine a tree-like set of checkboxes, ensuring that the user knows exactly where to go.
- Making the default timeline appearing at the top. This should be fairly straight forward I think.
- Aggregating things. This becomes quite complicated but would be useful. Not sure how much coding there would be. It also presents various UI issues, as to how to represent things, what to put in the hover over boxes, etc.
The screen shot of Act 2 with the Jesus timeline turned on illustrates a common occurance.
There is so much going on in the last week, that the Jesus timeline ends up very tall,
and the main timeline for Acts 2 has dropped to the bottom.
Two possible ways forward spring to mind
1) always make the default timeline (in this case NTChurch) always appear at the top.
2) find some way to concatenate events which occur at the same time.
- perhaps anything with exactly the same date, can be named after that date (eg 29 Apr 33 AD)
- or (more difficult) anything within a span of dates can be opened up by clicking on that span,
so that clicking on "Passion Week" opens up all dates within that span.
I'm sure you have already thought of these.
I think the last idea is the best but I imagine that it involves a LOT of programming.
Fantastic progress.
David IBPosted By Tyndale STEP Project to Tyndale STEP - Programming on 2/17/2010 02:25:00 AM
At 21:46 15/02/2010, Tyndale STEP Project wrote:
Hi guys
Newer version of the timeline component up on the crosswire website. It's not organised very nice on the screen, but you'll see a bunch of checkboxes to toggle timebands on and off, and then the timeline component.
Try for eg. Acts 2 or Ex 8:1 something like that. I've started working on the scripture display part which is probably the next key bit...
Chris
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Posted By Tyndale STEP Project to Tyndale STEP - Programming on 2/15/2010 01:46:00 PM
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