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
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