Have been using this great feature recently- totally changes the perspective on the lifemap!
I’m wondering if the filter UI is easily replaced with a sliding option?
Here’s an example of what I’m thinking about:
This specific UI has three options:
Dragging the bar to bound time on either side
Inputting dates manually by clicking the mm/dd/yyyy string
Selecting a date by clicking on the calendar
I’m mostly thinking how cool it would be to be able to ‘scroll’ through the lifemap.
Main challenges I imagine would be:
Is this tool even accessible on the platform?
Could the site re-calculate the lifemap quickly enough to keep up with the ‘live’ scrolling?
It is fast enough to replay like a video. You can get a sense of the speed of some animation by hovering your mouse over a very active LifeMap and dragging along multiple activities. It’ll highlight each individual activity (which is actually quite a bit more work than just showing/hiding activities).
I initially implemented a slider, but it was TERRIBLE to use. The activities on the LifeMap can go back very far in time, making any slight movement of the slider equate out to months of time. There’s also an edge case of some people who have mis-dated activities, going back to the 70s or even 1900’s and in some cases literally year 1.
My thought process was that I could either spend days/weeks/months building out an elaborate UI to account for all the possible ways to interact with dates, or I could release the simple start/end date picker that I had and work on improvements to that later on.
That makes a ton of sense! Thanks for the quick response, and consider my suggestion pulled. The feature works great for the filtering it aims to provide, and adding a feature to show a video-like progress vs time is a separate conversation. Thanks Jim.
(Is that emoji use indicative of the fact that ‘this ship has sailed’? )
(Is that emoji use indicative of the fact that ‘this ship has sailed’? )
oh no I intended to mean that I shipped what I had, and I can return to improve it later
I’m not against the idea of a slider, and if I can figure out a good way to implement it I will. It was just that in my testing, I always had to adjust manually after using the slider - it got to the point where the slider was just annoying.
I didn’t try stuff like programmatically building out ‘steps’ between two dates - given a first activity date, and a last activity date, build out a list of all the 1st days of each month in between (start at) and last days of each month in between (end at), and jump to each of those via a slider. At that point, I just didn’t really want to get into that.
If we do want to go further down that road (/canal passage, in keeping with the metaphor), it might be worth splitting this thread. This seemed like the best place to discuss the time filter, but this may be morphing away from the Announcement thread.
I’ve thought that having a normalized activity number behind the scenes of the slider that essentially distributed all activities along the slider evenly. Other options would be a totally different page for this feature, with a slider all the way along the horizontal page on the bottom or something.
But I’m not terribly intent on the idea- just wanted to throw this out. It wouldn’t even be near a top 10 ideas at the moment, given the time & effort it sounds like it would be.
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