Links connecting items being some kind of items themselves

Posted by CRC
Sep 18, 2010 at 10:02 PM

Hi:

quant wrote:

>1. It offers many ways to reorganize map, but none of them reorganize data so
>that items connected to the selected item are moved closer to it to see crearly the
>connection on the small map. Imagine a big map, and you connect two items that are far
>way. You can fade away rest of the map, but the link goes through the whole map and
>everything is too small.
>2. no attempt to position items to minimize text/items
>overlap.

I just used VUE for some brainstorming with myself (yeh, I do that sometimes) and found it very helpful. I did tend to lay out the diagram myself, though.

What I did to accomplish what you were trying to do was to use the select mode (those little boxes across the top of the screen) I clicked on the one that selected the nodes immediately connected to my node of interest. I then copied that selected set and pasted it into a new diagram. With a one or two of the layout tools I got a version that just need me to tweak some lines and positions in only a minute or two. This gave me a version where I could focus on that specific set of connectoins.

I, of course would prefer a better solution (perhaps a way to “weight” the connections and then a physics model (springs or other forces) that bring together truly connected items). But, until that comes along, I think I’ll continue to use VUE for this type of work.

Also, the developer is a university. Perhaps they would respond to some requirement statements (gotta keep those grad students busy).

Charles