And so it came to pass that April came to pass, and not so much updates have appeared here on the blog. But not so, anymore! Here are some updates.

new skyrails version

I've actually released a new version, and it's got plenty more stuff, however with a lot of hidden functionality. Mainly because they're still under construction. However, if you check the following thread, you can see what is new, and what you can do with it.
http://groups.google.com/group/skyrails ... 7ca2b77c91

download here:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~wyos/skyrai ... lsdist.rar

The most important update would be that it can take commands from an external server. This means it can take live data. It's sort of like a backdoor-enabled system now, but I'd rather call it a server.

current status

Now that my PhD is in full swing (had to go overseas for personal reasons for a while), there are a few possibilities on the project.

-> A new UI element is sort-of implemented, but not linked to the scripting language yet. This is what I'm working on right now.
-> Working on expanding the capacity of skyrails. It can show 300 nodes without much of a problem, but ~500 nodes and above will be. There's already a "grouping" function which can reduce positioning and display complexity, but yeah. I got something in mind, so it should be good.
-> Working on ways for skyrails to communicate to outside process. Note that outside processes can talk to skyrails, but not the other way around, yet.
-> Full screen mode? :)
-> Write a documentation to the protocol? And documentation to the language as well.. not my strong point, and the language is still changing.

When all those are done, then skyrails would start to be usable for many applications.

license

You may only use this beta-version of skyrails for non-commercial purposes, unless you are related to Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal and have authentic copies of their rackets to send to me.

custom projects aka advertisement

Do you want to use skyrails for commercial projects? Then by all means contact me.

the blog commands, they're gone!

The spambots always posts spam here, so I just periodically delete them. Or maybe I should upgrade this software..

That should be it for this time. When there's a new thing, I'll post updates here. For now, subscribe to the skyrails mailing list!
http://groups.google.com/group/skyrails-public

Greetings

Well, it's christmas holidays and soon it'll be 2008. Merry Christmas and Happy New Years. Basically since it's holidays, the next update for the Skyrails project will probably come at around march next year, which is when PhD starts. Until then, I'll be off to holidays..

Meanwhile, enjoy your holidays. Linux version for skyrails will come soon (real soon now(tm)) too.

Someone finally (thanks Christian) sent a mail in the skyrails-public mailing list, asking some questions, so I answered in the mailing list. It'll just become an FAQ here instead.

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> I am aware of that skyrails is a sprout of a PhD research
> project and these details may change.

Actually, I'm not doing a PhD *yet*. That's the plan for next year; this was for my honours year Software Engineering project.

> 1) I wonder if skyrails will be made open source and/or will be ported
> to other OSs or even Flash? In particular, I am interested in a web-
> enabled version.

Skyrails is cross platform. It's written in C++, uses my own graphics engine from my advanced graphics course from C++, utilises OpenGL + SDL, so it theoretically could run on any platforms (it works so far in linux and windows).

Porting it to something like flash or java though, will take a bit of an effort. My programming background is flash, and I'd say that porting it to flash you'll lose scriptability (not going to reimplement my programming language in that), 3D, and you'll also get much less nodes drawable at the same time, because flash is that much slower than c++.

I think though, creating a small flash version of skyrails is a novel idea.. it could be a good UI element for data display that can replace charts, who knows.

p.s, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~wyos/ <-- my flash games back from high school days

> 2) is it/ will it be possible to make use of data that is provided by
> web-services, or does the tool rely on specific graph descriptions?

Skyrails was originally aimed for social network visualisation. Then I realised it can also draw any (reasonably sized) graph interactively.

With that said, skyrails can import data from the VNA format (though in that downloadable version, it only supports partial VNA). It can also load data from CSV, where the network data is processed through the programming language (using a for loop etc, just look at the trade data).

You can also generate nodes as you want interactively in Skyrails, using the console. Press "~", and type
node: luke
node: leia
leia <- siblings -> luke
han -- shot -> greedo

Which comes to the next bit : if Skyrails can act as a "server" that listens to the client's request, it can be a user interface server of sorts. As the user interface is 100% user defineable (and there's a mouse gesture/menu system in the latest version of skyrails), you could imagine skyrails as a control interface server, and it can be used to send back instructions to the client.

Could be useful for something like monitoring and instructing speed dating participants on the next partner, or monitoring intranet computers and their traffic.

I'm still working this part out, so if you have ideas for the protocols, yeah..

There were also some other questions, which I'll answer now:

> Is the 3D element even useful at all?

Well, some graphs are simple enough that displaying them on 3D probably won't help, but some of the more tangled graphs like the lab data.. drawing them on 2D hides away some information, and the links start getting cluttered.

That and skyrails can actually run in stereo vision. I ran it in a 2x2m display at UNSW CSE's vislab. The depth perception really improves with it, you can feel that a node is that much closer to you.

With that said, in the future I want to make a "pseudo-2D" mode for skyrails. You can already do it by typing the following command:

"with nodes do nodeplane x 0 0 end"

But yeah.

> What is the future direction of skyrails?

User interface server (so much possibilities), temporal display (networks that change over time, how would you visualise them? this is useful for the social network analysis folks, I was told), even better aestethics.

With "good" aestethics, I mean something like 2advanced.com

> Will you release the source code?

Until I find out the full implications/consequences etc of open sourcing my code, I don't think I'll do it. Not a lawyer, all the law students that I know (only one btw) is having exams now.

Furthermore, I have my own standards of coding which are very different to virtually everyone else's coding standard. At least with respect to other open sourced codes I've seen, you'd see code here which you'd never, ever would wish to exist in your project, and I see code in those project which I would never ever want in my project.

Not that I don't want to open my project, but the standards are quite different.. until I can document the codes, write design notes (like any good software engineer :), the source code won't probably be released.

> Then how am I going to get a linux and mac distribution?

Sorry.. but maybe an i386 linux distribution would work. When Skyrails becomes something usable it'll most likely have distribution for those platform available.

> When will the next release come out? Any schedules?

I just finished my thesis report, and also finished my thesis presentation. So basically, I just finished my undegraduate honours degree. And it's christmas soon. And PhD won't start until next year, circa march. And I haven't had a decent holiday for a while. I mean, I just went to the movies for the first time, in almost a year today.

So yeah, you get the idea. I might work on it during the holidays, but I can't promise too much. Though that may change if I get funding (*cough*).

I might make a release soon though, as soon as I iron out some "issues" with the current version. Or maybe I'd wait til I manage to make it a UI server.. if anyone has any applications which they think could use skyrails as a front-end, I'll happily work with you!

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Also, I'm not a 21 y/o Irish guy. That's Fionbharr. And his thesis was pretty awesome too (for those who know about computer security).

greetings from my den

I have made a new youtube video of the system so far, along with some screenshots:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2d312_dXEs
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14933315@N ... 730584157/

Major updates include mouse gesture and a graph access expression builder. Now accessing "enemies of friends of parents" or "friends of people who attacked me" can be done within a single expression. More details after I finished my thesis.

And this version will be available online as soon as I manage to iron out some issues.

I've created two mailing lists:

http://groups.google.com/group/skyrails
The announcement mailing list for skyrails, when there are new major updates or anything like that.

http://groups.google.com/group/skyrails-public
And here's the public mailing list where anyone can join and talk about it.

I've added plenty more functionalities to skyrails, (in particular mouse gestures and sql-like graph access expressions) and in the next release the example files will have better interactivity. Probably very soon, but I've got a thesis report due soon (in tuesday week) :)

Cheers

youtube video, flickr high-res screenshots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxxar2ZonYg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14933315@N ... 2396775983

The screenshots on flickr are orders of magnitude better than the ones you find here.

download:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~wyos/skyrai ... lsdist.zip

To install, just extract the folder to a directory, and run "first.exe". That's all there is to it for now.

Coming soon:
Stereo vision support. Coming real soon now (maybe within this weekend).

Mailing list:
I've set up a mailing list, but lack any knowledge on anything other than CSE's manual mailing list. Mail me (wyosASDASD@cse.unsw.edu.au, without the ASDASD part (antispam)) to be subscribed, as I will periodically announce updates etc.

Important Info
Press the '~' button (top left of keyboard, just below the escape key) to summon the console. What commands you can enter right now is not documented, but look at the scripts directory and you will find that the software is very customisable

What is it?
Skyrails is a social network (or any graph really) visualization system. It has a built in programming language for processing (as far as visualisation attributes goes) the graph and its attributes. The system is not only aimed at expert users though, because through the scripting languages menus can be built and the system can be used by any users.

The main distinguishing point of the system comes from the built in scripting language, the added flexibility of how to represent attributes (nodes can be binded to planes and spheres based on their attributes) and the scriptability of the user interface system. This makes skyrails ideal for creating presentations targeted at the average users.

status
Also, the language is pretty easy to learn. However, right now because it's just the beta of this software, there are not much documentation for the language, and hence self-learning and guessing is the only way to go. This will (hopefully) change in the future.

You can see screenshots below, but first:

system requirements:
A computer with a decent graphics card. And the computer should be half decent, at least. If you don't have a half-decent graphics card, you'll get this kind of output:



Whereas, a decent one would look like this:



But if you have a computer with pixel and fragment shader, it would look like this:



Of course, high res is just inversion of colours happening, but it looks a lot better, at least in my opinion. This requires fragment shaders (a feature in most of the graphic cards out lately).

screenshots:

Look, it's naruto! The original image is actually inverted, and then inverted again in the program (inversion on).