Blog about (Web-) Programming, Graphics and Games.

28.11.2009

Rubik Cube

I'm working on a Rubik Cube Applet. It shall help me to solve that puzzle. The Applet size is about 9kb. The Applet also runs via Webstart.

06.10.2009

Black Metal Discographies




Working on a visualisation of discographies. Albums are ordered according to their releasedate. Thus you can see at a glance, which were created at the same time. Also this graphic points out, how long bands exists and when they had their (non)productive phases. I plan to make visualisations for more bands and different kind of metal/music, but currently I listen mostly to blackmetal :)

More generally I work on a tool to visualize historical data (here album releases), that are clustered by topics (here by the bands). More about such a general tool will be posted in the future. Stay tuned :)

08.09.2009

Blog Concept with Taglines


Thinking about a new layout-concept for blogs with tags.
Problem: In a blog with multiple entries with multiple different tags its hard to view/distinguish entries that share same tags.
Solution:
  • Colored lines, Taglines, each representing a tag, connect entries which have same tags.
  • Taglines for different tags have different colors and different horizontal position.
  • Entries are vertically ordered depending on creating time, newest entries above. Entries are horizontally shifted regarding their tags.
This concept improves the reading of blog-entries, wich belong together, while all entries remain visible. On the right side is an screenshot of an example-implementation.

Some concept-details:
  • The sorting of the tags, i.e. and the horizontal position and color of their taglines, depends on creation time of entries. Thus taglines of newer entries appear on the left side. Since entry shifting also depends on the tags, newer entries will also appear on the left side. This results in a good read-flow. Alternatively tag-sorting might depend on other criteria like tag-importance, thus most entries with most important tags would appear on the left side.
  • While taglines connect entries which share the corresponding tag, they may cross entries without that tag. Then they are displayed as if they lay under that entry, not connecting it.
  • The screenshot also shows a minimap, which may improve overview, if there are a lot of entries. There could also be a legend showing the color of the tags, and corresponding entry-counts.

01.08.2009

On 'Gods of War' by Manowar

Got the the Manowar CD 'Thunder in the Sky'. Its quite good, with less orchestra-stuff compared to the latest album 'Gods of War'. Here a list of my fav songs from 'Gods of War':
  • Sleipnir
  • Sons of odin
  • Gods of war
  • Odin
The other 12 tracks of the album are mostly instrumentals or ballads with lots of cheesy orchestra-stuff, but those 4 rock :)

28.07.2009

Working on circular stairs for a Doom3 mod.. In the pic some some zombies standing on them :)