Re: [Simile-Widgets] Re: tracking when labels become visible
On Jul 12, 2011, at 3:46 PM, John S wrote:
I was just talking with one of the creators of the Timemap project,
and he had some good ideas, but the only suggestions he had, came
directly from their plugin, which I'm not implementing, and likely
won't because of the specific way I'm setting this up already.
Curious as to why you find Timemap unacceptable for your purposes. It's a
nicely done library. I've worked with it in the past and had no problems using
it.
Just because it provides one way of constructing a Timeline and a map, doesn't
mean that's the only way to do it. Since it is built on top of Timeline 2.3.0,
it's possible to use Timeline as you would normally, and call into Timemap's
code as necessary. Or override parts of Timemap to do what you need instead.
But one of the ideas he suggested that I liked the best was, would
there be a simple way, or is there already a simple way to get a min
and max visible date of the top timeline band? I've been searching the
documentation, but I usually have a hard time finding stuff on there.
Yes, it's easy.
tl.getBand(0).getMinVisibleDate()
==Date {Mon Jun 30 2008 13:45:36 GMT-0400 (EDT)}
tl.getBand(0).getMaxVisibleDate()
== Date {Sun Nov 30 2008 01:14:24 GMT-0500 (EST)}
--Mike
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Re: [Simile-Widgets] Re: tracking when labels become visible
See Timemap, by Nick Rabinowitz: http://code.google.com/p/timemap/ That has the code to show only items from the visible portion of the timeline on the map. --Mike On Jul 12, 2011, at 9:57 AM, John S wrote: I'll give you some background on my project... I'm working on a google maps wizard that does... honestly a bit of everything. The timeline is just the latest feature. I am looking at creating something similar to the Timeline project that's built on top of Simile, but for that project, you have to load the map into the timeline object, and I'd rather have the map be the base of everything, and just create my own bridge between the two of them. The reasons get fairly detailed on this, but it's the best approach I can take. All of the map markers and and event specific items for the timeline are stored in the database. I make the distinction between map markers and timeline specific items, because I create map markers with start/ end dates, but recognize there are times when we'll want to add something to a timeline that isn't a map marker. These items are pulled from the database and I build a 2d array of events and markers for JS. From there, the JS creates the JSON calls to load them into the timeline. I do it this way because I'm able to dynamically edit everything without ever having to reload the page. So far, none of this is the issue. The last bit of functionality that I'm looking to recreate is... as I scroll the timeline, I'd like to have only the items on the top tape be the ones that are visible on the map, so that as you scroll the timeline, you'll be able to see the progression of the items move across the map. Making the markers on the map appear/disappear isn't an issue, that's definitely easy enough to do, the part that I'm stumped on is finding an effective way to track the events on the timeline that are currently visible. I understand what you're talking about on the load that it could create, and that was my biggest worry, but I wasn't sure of a better approach for it all. As far as the load goes, I don't think I'll even hit a timeline with more than a couple hundred items on it realistically, though I'm sure now that I said that, I'll come up with one that has over 3000, lol. This is a pretty winded post, but I think it explains everything in pretty well detail with the exception of posting sample code, lol. I'd love to hear some more ideas though. On Jul 11, 5:44 pm, Michael Nosal mno...@mitre.org wrote: John, What are you trying to make Timeline do? It would help if I understood what you were trying to accomplish. Attaching listeners to each individual event is expensive to do, and can cause performance problems if done incorrectly. Timeline does support the ability to add listeners to the individual events - the onSelectListener gets fired when you click on an event and the eventPaintListeners get fired when the Timeline .paint() is called. Because of the expense of adding listeners, and the potential for having to fire too many listeners, or check too many events, you might look at using event delegation instead. Set a scroll listener on a band and let it decide what to do based on the time and events shown. I'm not sure what you mean by having the server side script generate loading calls for you. Better to have the server provide the data necessary for your event loading, and use the client side javascript to load that data. Keeps things cleaner and easier to maintain if you ever need to change formats, load order, etc. --Mike On Jul 11, 2011, at 5:13 PM, John S wrote: I've been hunting around for this, but I haven't been able to find anything yet, and I wanted to see if anyone else had any suggestions for a good way to do this. I'm currently loading everything dynamically with JSON calls, and setting a custom class for each item. (these calls are being generated from a server side script that's writing the loading calls for me, so the names are something like, event26 where the 26 is the event ID in the database.) Because of the way I'm doing this I can attach a listener to each event individually, based on the unique class names, but I'm just not sure what to look for as the trigger of the listener. I'd like to have the listener trigger whenever the labels become visible. I know thats a vague way to describe a trigger, but that's half my problem of coming up with a better plan of attack. If anyone has any ideas on how I could go about doing this, it would be a serious help! I don't even need the specific code, just a push in the right direction should be enough for me to go on. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups SIMILE Widgets group. To post to this group, send email to simile-widgets@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to simile-widgets+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more
Re: [Simile-Widgets] Re: tracking when labels become visible
John, You may find useful the way I solved this problem for my Itinerary of John site: http://neolography.com/timelines/JohnItinerary.html Note the updateMap() function in http://neolography.com/timelines/js/itin-code.js Jon On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 12:46 PM, John S faceless...@gmail.com wrote: I was just talking with one of the creators of the Timemap project, and he had some good ideas, but the only suggestions he had, came directly from their plugin, which I'm not implementing, and likely won't because of the specific way I'm setting this up already. But one of the ideas he suggested that I liked the best was, would there be a simple way, or is there already a simple way to get a min and max visible date of the top timeline band? I've been searching the documentation, but I usually have a hard time finding stuff on there. On Jul 12, 11:08 am, Michael Nosal mno...@mitre.org wrote: See Timemap, by Nick Rabinowitz:http://code.google.com/p/timemap/ That has the code to show only items from the visible portion of the timeline on the map. --Mike On Jul 12, 2011, at 9:57 AM, John S wrote: I'll give you some background on my project... I'm working on a google maps wizard that does... honestly a bit of everything. The timeline is just the latest feature. I am looking at creating something similar to the Timeline project that's built on top of Simile, but for that project, you have to load the map into the timeline object, and I'd rather have the map be the base of everything, and just create my own bridge between the two of them. The reasons get fairly detailed on this, but it's the best approach I can take. All of the map markers and and event specific items for the timeline are stored in the database. I make the distinction between map markers and timeline specific items, because I create map markers with start/ end dates, but recognize there are times when we'll want to add something to a timeline that isn't a map marker. These items are pulled from the database and I build a 2d array of events and markers for JS. From there, the JS creates the JSON calls to load them into the timeline. I do it this way because I'm able to dynamically edit everything without ever having to reload the page. So far, none of this is the issue. The last bit of functionality that I'm looking to recreate is... as I scroll the timeline, I'd like to have only the items on the top tape be the ones that are visible on the map, so that as you scroll the timeline, you'll be able to see the progression of the items move across the map. Making the markers on the map appear/disappear isn't an issue, that's definitely easy enough to do, the part that I'm stumped on is finding an effective way to track the events on the timeline that are currently visible. I understand what you're talking about on the load that it could create, and that was my biggest worry, but I wasn't sure of a better approach for it all. As far as the load goes, I don't think I'll even hit a timeline with more than a couple hundred items on it realistically, though I'm sure now that I said that, I'll come up with one that has over 3000, lol. This is a pretty winded post, but I think it explains everything in pretty well detail with the exception of posting sample code, lol. I'd love to hear some more ideas though. On Jul 11, 5:44 pm, Michael Nosal mno...@mitre.org wrote: John, What are you trying to make Timeline do? It would help if I understood what you were trying to accomplish. Attaching listeners to each individual event is expensive to do, and can cause performance problems if done incorrectly. Timeline does support the ability to add listeners to the individual events - the onSelectListener gets fired when you click on an event and the eventPaintListeners get fired when the Timeline .paint() is called. Because of the expense of adding listeners, and the potential for having to fire too many listeners, or check too many events, you might look at using event delegation instead. Set a scroll listener on a band and let it decide what to do based on the time and events shown. I'm not sure what you mean by having the server side script generate loading calls for you. Better to have the server provide the data necessary for your event loading, and use the client side javascript to load that data. Keeps things cleaner and easier to maintain if you ever need to change formats, load order, etc. --Mike On Jul 11, 2011, at 5:13 PM, John S wrote: I've been hunting around for this, but I haven't been able to find anything yet, and I wanted to see if anyone else had any suggestions for a good way to do this. I'm currently loading everything dynamically with JSON calls, and setting a custom class for each item. (these calls are being generated from a server side script that's writing the loading calls for me, so
