Monday, January 9th, 2006
MeasureMap Flash Slider Released
Adaptive Path have kindly released a two bundles of the date slider widget that they use in Measure Map (which we covered in the past).
The date slider is a Flash visualization that Measure Map uses as one way to navigate the site. We are happy to provide a version of this date slider to the public.
What the slider does
After sending the date slider an initial date_range variable in JavaScript,
the slider automatically moves to display the given date range. Then as the
user interacts with the date slider, three variables are sent from Flash to
JavaScript.
- Raw Date Range: A range of dates in the following format (20050721T00:00:00-20050809T00:00:00)
- Clean Date Range: A range of dates in the following format (Thur. July 21-Tues.
Aug. 09)- Total Count: A total count of the dates within the defined date range
How you can customize it (variables set in the JavaScript)
- Bar color (bar_color): The color of the graph bars
- Box Color (box_color): The color of the box that stretches to follow
the handles- Line Color (line_color): The color of the graph lines in the background
- Tracking Variable Name (variable_name): “Things” can become
anything- XML File Name (file_name): file name and location (could be URL to dynamic
XML file). See exampleSome Rules
- The XML file must be formatted in the same way as date_slider_data.xml
- The XML node value may change, however the ‘date’ node must be formatted
the same way- The XML file must have exactly 120 nodes
What the Slider Uses
- JavaScript Flash Integration Kit
- Ladislav Zigo’s MovieClip Tweening Prototype classes
- All components are included in both bundles
Downloads
- SWF version with the ability to customize the look & feel of the slider as well as the location and name of the XML file.
- Developers version which includes the FLA file.
Looks very nice. These kind of components make the development of rich user interfaces for applications much better.
* By the way, the link to the sample xml file (http://ajaxian.com/archives/date_slider_data.xml) isn’t working ;)
It would be nicer if the demo used math correctly. The “Total Count between Range” never really matched up to the sum of daily totals included in the range. Try out a few days and see if the total matches what you think it should be…