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This is cool but using rectangles instead of circles would help this visualization. Circles waste real estate and not friendly to labels (e.g. curved text that
by juancampa 5y ago
This is cool but using rectangles instead of circles would help this visualization. Circles waste real estate and not friendly to labels (e.g. curved text that is harder to read)
- wattenberger 5y agoThere are definitely many trade-offs with using a circle pack layout - I snuck a bit of the reasoning into the collapsed section halfway through the write-up! Overall, this layout worked best for me, with the nesting feeling very natural and the circles feeling very "atomic". But big picture, this write-up isn't tied to the current visualization! It's more focused on exploring _how_ a visual representation could help our understanding of codebases. There are tons of jumping off points, including different vizes!
- dandelany 5y agoGreat idea & execution, I've definitely thought about building something similar and have tried Gource once before. However, I must add a +1 to the parent commenter re: rectangles. Circle packing is pretty, but a proper rectangular tree map interface gives you everything the circle map does with better labels, less wasted space, and less chance of a funky circle layout from the force/relaxing algorithm. This would be great for a presentation where I'm trying to make our codebase look flashy and cool. But for actually getting work done, I'll take a tree map any day. Check out the mac app GrandPerspective if you haven't seen it - great use of tree maps for cleaning up hard drive space.
- XCSme 5y agoI agree, I like how JS bundle analyzers do it: https://twitter.com/XCSme/status/1410608222872891399 https://twitter.com/XCSme/status/1410608222872891399
- thiht 5y agoAgree on this. Rectangles can also be aligned and given a logical order. It’s probably less nice to the eye than circles, but more useful.