Source for all the examples

The session was recorded, so once the video is online, I’ll post it here to give some more context to the examples.

UPDATE:
You can download the session video here. Just do a ctrl+f for my name. Looks like the screen recording didn’t go as planned, but they got the audio.

At the last 360 Tom gave a talk that accompanied the alpha release of Axiis, and I did some on-stage coding, demonstrating how to build a custom visualization. A few months later we gave a similar talk at CFUnited about a more polished beta release, and Tom gave a solo talk about the framework at MAX. I want this coming session to be accessible to people who didn’t attend those talks but still be interesting to our previous audience members and users. I’ll briefly cover the back-story (what Axiis is and what problems it solves) and the basics of the framework to bring everyone up to speed, but the meat of the session will be about usage tips and tricks. My hope is that regardless of experience, everyone comes out to the session with a stronger sense of what they can accomplish with Axiis and how.

Here’s the description as it appears on the schedule:

During this session we’ll dive headfirst into the Axiis data visualization framework. We’ll start with the basics — the Axiis render cycle and using the built in visualizations — and get into more advanced topics — creating custom visualizations, adding interactivity, and addressing performance bottlenecks. No prior knowledge of Axiis is required.

The session is at 4:30 on the last day of the conference. See you there!

It’s a quick spot, but around the one minute mark you’ll see some of those tools, including my baby, the Incident Timeline.  The Timeline lays out every action that’s been taken to clear a traffic accident scene along a temporal axis so traffic operators can quickly discern what’s going on at the location.  Without the Timeline, the operators would be stuck looking at a list of timestamped descriptions, and that’s not really ideal when quick decision making is key.

Also featured are the lab’s travel time prediction tool and a Google Earth-like application we like to call the Virtual Helicopter.

There is no built in way to perform this check, so putting it modestly, the solution is a bit of a hack.  In a debug swf, the stack trace contains line number information that is absent in a release swf.  To check if you’re in debug mode, all you have to do is throw an error, catch it, and check the stack trace for the square brackets that surround the line numbers.

Here is a little class I wrote that will perform this check.

package com.michaelvandaniker.capabilities
{
    public class SWFCapabilities
    {
        private static var hasDeterminedDebugStatus:Boolean = false;
 
        public static function get isDebug():Boolean
        {
            if(!hasDeterminedDebugStatus)
            {
                try
                {
                    throw new Error();
                }
                catch(e:Error)
                {
                    var stackTrace:String = e.getStackTrace();
                    _isDebug = stackTrace != null && stackTrace.indexOf("[") != -1;
                    hasDeterminedDebugStatus = true;
                    return _isDebug;
                }
            }
            return _isDebug;
        }
        private static var _isDebug:Boolean;
    }
}

I’ve tested this class in the debug and release versions of Flash Player 10.0.12 and 9.0.124.

There are seven other people from the CATT Lab presenting their work as well. The majority of that work is in the realm of information visualization. If that’s your thing, and you’re in DC today, stop by the American Institute of Architects and see what we’ve been up to.

Happy World Usability Day, everyone.

Who am I?  I’m a computer science graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and my research focuses on human-computer interaction and information visualization. I’m currently working at the CATT Lab, writing software that allows users to manage and explore real-time and archived transportation data.

That’s me in a nutshell.  Fun experiments to follow.  See you next time.