Saturday, July 1st, 2006
Similie: Draggable Timelines
Category: UI
Similie is a neat way to view timeline data. Instead of paginating, it offers a continuous strip which you can drag back and forth with your mouse, a la Google Maps. It’s open-source from MIT. You only have to point the widget at an XML date file:
<event start="Apr 01 1883 00:00:00 GMT" end="May 01 1883 00:00:00 GMT" title="Moved to
Giverny with Alice Hoschedé">
Alice Hoschedé decided to help Monet by bringing up his two children
together with her own. They lived in Poissy, which Monet hated.
In April 1883 they moved to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Haute-Normandie,
where he planted a large garden which he painted for the rest of his life.
</event>
The detailed text is revealed in a popup balloon, when you click on the event. You can also have synchronized “bands” alongside each other, showing the time on different scale.
Web timeline, anyone?
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4.3 rating from 50 votes
A definite ajax masterpiece. Simple, fast and XML based. Great for event and time tracking. It might be interesting to synchronize the XML namespace with the xCal specifications (example) – it’s a little more talkative, but it would ease the transition between formats. A job well done!
Just to be precise, the name of the software is “Timeline”, SIMILE (not Similie) is the name of the project that implemented it.
[...] Thanks to the guys at Ajaxian for finding this. [...]
It’s a real app.
“AJAXy”? Well at least they don’t say “DHTMLy,” though the latter might be more technically applicable. ;)
The presentation is well-done, despite a few quirky “sticky” issues with scrolling (if the mouse hits a text node while dragging, the scroll stops working or highlights a bunch of text in IE.) Overall, nicely done though!
Am i the only one who finds this piece of technology kind of cool, but still not visually easy enough to read?
Came just in the neck of time! One of the best open source project I’ve seen in a LONG time.
Honestly, we need more projects like these in our open source community!
I really respect these guys for sharing and if I ever get to create any useful projects, I will make sure I donate them back to the community as well.
A masterpiece for sure!
Oh wow, this is simply awesome. Seems to have a slight problem when scrolling, the whole pane can become easily highlighted, but otherwise it’s the dogs!
Santa vaca! That thing is amazing – and it’s open source and free…amazing. I wish I had time (and the creativity) for writing these types of controls.
Open source! This is great–I love it. Fantastic work.