{"id":226,"date":"2009-04-01T12:52:47","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T17:52:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/?p=226"},"modified":"2009-04-01T12:55:14","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T17:55:14","slug":"thunderbird-gloda-exptoolbar-protovis-paninaro-oh-oh-oh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/2009\/04\/01\/thunderbird-gloda-exptoolbar-protovis-paninaro-oh-oh-oh\/","title":{"rendered":"thunderbird, gloda, exptoolbar, protovis, paninaro, oh oh oh"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-gloda-256.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-274\" title=\"exptoolbar-protovis-gloda-256\" src=\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-gloda-256-514x600.png\" alt=\"exptoolbar-protovis-gloda-256\" width=\"514\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-gloda-256-514x600.png 514w, https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-gloda-256-257x300.png 257w, https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-gloda-256.png 718w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 514px) 100vw, 514px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Thunderbird.\u00a0 With the global database, gloda.\u00a0 Using the exptoolbar extension.\u00a0 Using the <a href=\"http:\/\/vis.stanford.edu\/protovis\/\">protovis javascript visualization library<\/a>.\u00a0 For reals!\u00a0 Not a prank!\u00a0 Just <a href=\"http:\/\/clicky.visophyte.org\/momo\/xpis\/exptoolbar\/\">grab the most recent XPI<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/hg.mozilla.org\/users\/bugmail_asutherland.org\/exptoolbar\/\">grab the repo<\/a>.\u00a0 And be using a nightly (beta 2 might work?)<\/p>\n<p>What you are looking at:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The exptoolbar search results page, augmented with a visualization.<\/li>\n<li>Each conversation with search results gets its own wedge.\n<ul>\n<li>Wedges can be distinguished because of the alternating background colors.<\/li>\n<li>Conversations that you sent a message to will have a red shading to them.\u00a0 The examples may be somewhat misleading because the account where a lot of my sent mail ends up is not part of the profile used to create the screenshots.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Each message is placed in its conversation wedge&#8230;\n<ul>\n<li>The radius is based on the &#8216;age&#8217; of the message using a log-ish scale.\u00a0 Interpolation is actually linear at each level (one day, one week, one month, three months, one year, 5 years, &#8216;forever&#8217;.)<\/li>\n<li>The angular placement within the wedge is based on the author of the message.\u00a0 Across all wedges the placement is the same.\u00a0 This helps &#8216;bursty&#8217; parts of conversations (which are extremely likely) be made more obvious, while also helping to provide some understanding of conversation dynamics.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Message shapes are determined by whether the message is starred (diamond), sent by a &#8216;popular&#8217; contact (circle), or an unpopular one (cross).\u00a0 The use of popularity is a temporary measure because current gloda in trunk does not cache address-book lookups, and they are expensive.\u00a0 Once the new gloda search code lands with those changes, we can rely on the existence of an address book entry.\u00a0 (Starring a contact using the new message reader adds them to your address book.)<\/li>\n<li>Message opacity is determined by whether the message is a &#8216;hit&#8217; or not.\u00a0 All messages in a conversation are eventually retrieved, though initially we only have the hits.<\/li>\n<li>Message color is determined by applied tags (using the closest tango color for the first tag), or whether the message is starred (closest tango color to yellow, where I think I had removed the yellow tango colors for some unknown reason, so we get green I guess).\u00a0 It&#8217;s grey if the message has no tag or star.<\/li>\n<li>The subject of the conversation is displayed in the wedge.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-seek-thunderbird-256.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-275\" title=\"exptoolbar-protovis-seek-thunderbird-256\" src=\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-seek-thunderbird-256-600x594.png\" alt=\"exptoolbar-protovis-seek-thunderbird-256\" width=\"600\" height=\"594\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-seek-thunderbird-256-600x594.png 600w, https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-seek-thunderbird-256-300x297.png 300w, https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/exptoolbar-protovis-seek-thunderbird-256.png 711w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Things that are happy:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/vis.stanford.edu\/protovis\/\">protovis<\/a> is delightful, even at this early stage of its development.<\/li>\n<li>The radar-styled visualization looks fairly neat, and basically proves at least feature parity with my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/2007\/11\/02\/radial-radar-email-vis-with-care-factors\/\">visophyte-based radar visualization<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Things that are sad (aka caveats):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It would probably be better if the visualization was not radar-inspired.\u00a0 Besides the perceptual reasons, the subjects are harder to read than they would be in an equivalent linear-styled visualization.<\/li>\n<li>The visualization is not interactive.\u00a0 protovis officially has no interaction support yet, but if you look in the (only available minified?) source, it&#8217;s almost there.\u00a0 It might be entirely there, but it didn&#8217;t work for me immediately after a quick reading of the (indented) source.<\/li>\n<li>There is some low probability failure that occurs during the visualization updating as gloda backfills the message collections.\u00a0 If it happens on the last update, you can end up with a half-built visualization.\u00a0 Re-running the search will generally resolve the issue.<\/li>\n<li>The visualization does a pretty solid job of taking up all the screen real estate and has no way to be disabled, so you have to scroll past it every time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Future work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Interactivity.<\/li>\n<li>Perhaps showing the gravatars for the people involved in a conversation at the outer rim of the wedge, positioning them based on the author positioning we determined.<\/li>\n<li>Perhaps lose the radar motif.<\/li>\n<li>Your thoughts \/ patches!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thunderbird.\u00a0 With the global database, gloda.\u00a0 Using the exptoolbar extension.\u00a0 Using the protovis javascript visualization library.\u00a0 For reals!\u00a0 Not a prank!\u00a0 Just grab the most recent XPI or grab the repo.\u00a0 And be using a nightly (beta 2 might work?) &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/2009\/04\/01\/thunderbird-gloda-exptoolbar-protovis-paninaro-oh-oh-oh\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3,6,4],"tags":[38,19,56,126],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email","category-mozilla","category-thunderbird","category-visualizing","tag-exptoolbar","tag-gloda","tag-protovis","tag-thunderbird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}