Cool. Thanks for trying it out.

On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, Karl Ramberg wrote:

> Hi,
> I've tested the app and it works fine. It's a really cool way to present
> history/ present/ news or any topic for that matter. Can I use it for looking
> trough the Squeak mailing list?

Thanks. If I take the Squeak mail archive and preprocess it you should be
able to use that tool for navigating and exploring it. I'll have to run it
on an e-mail archive for one of my experiments.

> It takes a few minutes to get used to the zooming function. How about a
> magnifying glass tool?

You're in Morphic, so if you pull up the World menu and select 'new
morph...' you can get a Magnifier Morph and a Fisheye Morph from the Demo
category. If you're talking about a non-linear timescale, it's on my list. 

I think the widgets I have for zooming are a bit clunky. There are 6 total
and I think its a bit confusing. I'm thinking of redoing that part. Any
suggestions?

> It's really slow loading (+1 min) on a mac8500/150,
> cable modem. I don't now how big the things pulled of the net are?

The files it reads in are 11K, 16K, 90K, and 250K.

> A few questions :
> 1 What do the red bars mean. Some are bigger than the others, are they more
> valid than the others in a demo priority list?

Importance is given by y location, so the top story is on top. Size (area)
relates to coverage of the topic, so if story A has a red block twice as
large as story B, there's twice as much info about A.

> 2 When i click on the names I get a popup menu on related issues, but the sub
> menu
> do not evoke anything? Not yet implemented?

The 'Make Title' is implemented, all the rest call Timeline>>#doNothing. I
intend to put hooks in there to call back to the server, so you can get a
histogram of a terms usage over time, or view all the phrases a term
appears in. At some point I have to be able to call up a document
relating to a topic, so there's quite a bit of interaction still to be put
in. 

> 3 The "fixed y" button. Is that also part of the prioritizing of the info?

'fixed y' positions all the blocks based on their importance, with the #1
at the top, and the number N (382 in one case) at the bottom. They start
overwriting each other and get hard to read, so the 'fill y' on the button
spreads out all the displayed topics to fill the whole grid. I have to
rewrite the code that places the blocks and the buttons and add some sort
of collision detection.

> 
> All of this probably becomes part of the documentation.
> 
> Karl
> 
> 

Thanks for trying it out. My advisor is giving a demo of it on Tuesday and
I started getting nervous when I read statements about Morphic being 2
mouseclicks away from disaster.

-Russell Swan