It’s About Time!
It’s been so long since I last posted, I’m truly embarrassed. However, it’s not without reason. I’ve been so heads down with getting MemoryMiner 2.0 ready for sale, that I’ve simply been ignoring the blog.
Since MemoryMiner is very very nearly ready to ship (Fabio, you’re going to have that beautiful new web site ready for me, right?) I thought it would be nice to add another sneak preview, which is the totally revamped time slider. The time slider in the current 1.x version of MemoryMiner only allows you to search with a resolution of one month:
The biggest problem with this time slider is that it doesn’t change resolution as the date range does (i.e. you want to see months and days for a time span of just a few months, or decades and years for a longer time span). Further, at a certain point, you can’t cram in all the markers on a traditional slider: the user never gets accurate results.
This is not an easy problem to solve, but I think I’ve come up with a pretty elegant solution. Behold the new multi-resolution time slider, shown here measuring in decades and years:
…shown here, measuring in years and months:
…and shown here, measuring in months and days:
It took a tremendous effort to get this all working correctly, and there’s a still a bit graphical tweaking to do, but it’s a world of improvement over the prior solution.
I have tons of ideas for new things to do with timelines, but first I have to ship 2.0, so back to the time machine (I mean coal mine).
PS Another excuse for the lack of blog posts is that I’ve been podcasting regularly on the Mac Developer Network (http://www.mac-developer-network.com/category/shows/). I even did two video podcasts, one of which can be seen here: http://www.pixelcorps.tv/mbkd_031