Mary Panttaja

(No, this is not about the current season giving way to summer.)

On the train Monday, the people next to us were having a business meeting/consultation of some sort. I couldn’t help but notice a beautiful application that was being shared. (One of the party had developed it.) It was a particularly appealing form of graphic analysis that I have been intrigued with understanding. The visualization is a network graph with dynamic movement. I have come across them in several contexts.

Erik Loyer has used them creatively in some of his digital artwork at his site, The Lair of the Marrow Monkey. Some of his work has been commissioned by MIT Press. A presentation on the book Writing Machines by Anne Burdick is here: Hollowbound Book. (Try moving your mouse over images to elicit interesting behaviors.)

There is a thesaurus available in a network representation: the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus. The intriguing thing about these network diagrams is that they have been animated—they react and self adjust, so they feel a little alive.

I have been searching for software for them and have been stifled by not knowing what to call them. Finally I found a developer, Mark Shepard of Adobe, who has created a Flex component. He calls them spring graphs. Of course, they have the advantage of being built in Flash/Flex which makes them even more intriguing.

They have something to do with the analytic work that has been tickling my brain. Something to do with structuring information, the origins of which have come from my writing requirements that I previously discussed. Jim and I have started exploring how we apply other constructs and constraint based concepts to the basic network structures. Not sure why, but we find it interesting.

The images from the train were also beautiful. Colorful networked gems moving and unfolding on a black night sky. Very intriguing and compelling. Who knows where it leads.

PS. Another source of information is the site TouchGraph.Co; they have Java-based Google and Amazon browsers.

One of the blogs I read is Ryan Stewart’s Digital Backcountry where he covers rich internet applications. (He recently went to work for Adobe and covers Flex/Apollo extensively.)

There is a useful post on some new features coming out in Flex 3 that concern “deep linking” in Flash/Flex/Apollo applications. This has been an issue for web developers who come from the world where linking out of the application is possible and/or the user employing the “back” button is an inherent part of the application behavioral syntax. Flash/Flex applications, as “contained” application environments don’t inherently have a back button or a back button syntax and, up till now, the user couldn’t link out of the application.

Ryan writes correctly:

This also meant the back button wouldn’t work, so Flex/Flash felt very different from the browser experience and it was something that’s been criticized in parts of the community. There are some significant theoretical arguments about what the back button should actually do in the context of an application, and that has also been part of the problem.

In some ways I see this as an artifact resulting from trying to use one functional model to replace all other models whether or not it fit. The basic web technology (with its links and page sequencing (including back and forward)) was designed to present stand-alone objects (pages with text or whatever) in a sequential (or multi-linked-sequential) flow, originally without context or much control. Building functioning applications in this environment has always seemed like a bit of a kludgy hack to those of us who have designed contained and controlled application architectures. Of course, “web application” technology has evolved its capabilities to maintain application context and control behavior, but it has always suffered from a lack of true context control oftentimes because of behaviors like the back button.

So it is a “new” solution to a “new” problem: before the advent of the internet, application architecture enabled us exert control over content, context, and user behavior. Of course, they weren’t universally available over a ubiquitous universal network, so these days are better days in many ways. Adobe has published some really good talks and white papers on how application architecture took a large set of backwards steps, which are now getting addressed with several new offerings from many vendors.

Stewart reports that behavior that doesn’t reflect “browser” behavior is seen to be a deficient architecture. The reality is that every application needs to be able to control context and behavior as necessary within the requirements of the application, the user, and the proper control of the dataspace and context. Something as innocuous as the “back” button can’t be a sacred cow—elegance, usability, correctness, and common sense need to lead the day in building future applications.

The new application platforms that will allow applications to work on the internet and on the desktop (so far we’ve looked a bit at Adobe Apollo and Google Gears, though there are others) are exciting, but we have to get passed a need to hold them to a standard that only came to exist in the last decade and is a short term artifact of the current evolution of development capabilities.

And then there is the data management issue that Jim has discussed here, and which we will be exploring further. The models for managing the distributed dataspace of distributed applications (online and offline) are complicated and challenging.