Re: [Gmod-ajax] "Game designers obsess about making all the micro bits entertaining"

[Mitch S. <mit...@be...>]

As far as the browser goes, the main entertaining things I've been 
thinking about involve animation.  Mainly animating pans along the 
chromosome and animating zoom level transitions.  I was thinking I'd 
have to justify that kind of functionality with the argument that it 
helps you keep your gut sense of where you are if the application can 
engage your visual system's object tracking functionality.  But I think 
it's also fun, or at least when I put together the experiment below I 
spent some time clicking on the arrow buttons-

http://genome.biowiki.org/test/boatdiv/boat.html

I think the animation above is cool because it uses a non-linear 
function (cos) to control the pan (and some of the js frameworks have 
even fancier animations that begin to approach physics-model 
slickness).  At some point I intend to put that pan animation into an 
actual browser.

The original idea behind that experiment was to see how many divs the 
browser could handle before it started to bog down.  When I was looking 
at the Simile::Timeline demos, the panning was pretty slow on Linux 
(although it was much smoother on windows and mac).  I wondered whether 
the slowness came from the number of divs or from how wide the view 
was.  On my hardware on linux the demo above can do a few thousand divs 
before panning starts to slow down, so I think if we do a good job of 
attaching and detaching things from the DOM (rather than having a very 
wide view like Simile::Timeline does) then a div-based genome browser 
could be pretty snappy.  Especially if we switch to a feature-density 
plot when the view starts to get busy.

It works in Firefox, Safari, and IE 6.  IE doesn't like the manual 
dragging for some reason, but the animation works fine.

Mitch