David Janes' Code Weblog

SIMILE Timeline is “the Google Maps for time based events”. It used to be housed at MIT but now it’s graduated to Google Code. I’ve created an example application showing this year’s Oscar awards and a number of movies that are, umm, are not all likely to be nominated.

• the application source can be seen here; it is based on this demo and some work I had done previously. Note:
  • multiple scrolling bands linked together
  • custom icons
  • custom colors
• we demonstrate populating the timeline widget using JSON data coded in the application; the most difficult part of putting this demo together was cutting and pasting all this data, a task we hope to make easier with our DQT code
• the documentation for Timeline is starting to diverge from the source code; showEventText is now replaced by overview in the band creation code
• there’s a large number of weaknesses (still) with Timeline for dealing with arbitrary data, these may be corrected in the Javascript code but I don’t have time to go through all this
  • note the incorrect placement of custom icons; using Firebug to inspect the HTML, I discovered that unfortunately everything is placed using style tags so it’s difficult to correct using CSS. Ideally I would like to be able to assign classes and ID tags to everything
  • there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to control the widths of the labels; in fact, if I reduce the band spacing in the top band, the text starts to overlap in a horrible manner
  • popup information boxes get confused when there is too little space to display information
  • when I don’t add a description to events, it uses “undefined” (see the Oscar Nominations Period)
  • date display functions are inferring more resolution (i.e. an actual time as opposed to the just the date) that I’m giving it

If anyone has corrections for me I’ll update the demo