Brainfold

Again, all my programming effort has been spent on the visualization prototype for my university course. On the positive side, I have lots of ideas on how to go on when I have time to continue my hobby projects. Working on the prototype has been a bit of a pain, as programming user interfaces and visualizations is all about the details, and there are loads of details in every graphical application. We’re quite tight on the schedule too, but thankfully the prototype doesn’t have to be fully functioning, it just has to demonstrate the idea.

I have mixed feelings about working with C#. On the other hand, the GUI facilities of .Net are the best I’ve ever worked with, but on the other hand, I’m often missing Python when it would make a solution much more straightforward than C#. And why the heck does the size of container have to be either Count or Length, depending on the container? I know, I know, choosing IronPython could potentially combine the benefits of both, but I don’t really have time to find out if that’s the case.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the prototype, now showing article topics. They’re generated from article keywords by a simple and crappy clustering algorithm because I didn’t have time to implement a better one, and laid out crudely, but that’s a start. The square icons are articles, and their colors match topic colors. Additionally, article icons should appear inside topic areas, but they don’t yet. I really hope I have the time to improve topic display by the end of the project.

Tags: C#, information visualization, screenshots