Show HN: Cmap – interactive visualization library for concept map | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cmap – interactive visualization library for concept map

github.com

45 pointsrlv043436 comments

If you don't want a library but a complete product, I will do a small advertisement for OrgPad.com here. It is completely free currently and we plan on keeping a basic account free, with no adds etc. forever. OrgPad is used quite a bit in alternative education here in Czechia because it is very simple and opens usable ways to less linear education and thinking. It seems kids even in the 4th or 5th grade like it a lot. You can actually browse explicitly published OrgPages at https://orgpad.com/list even without an account. There is quite a bit of JavaScript, that is calculating the topologically stable auto-layout and animations. That runs best in Google Chrome, because it just calculates this kind of JavaScript the quickest. We will probably rewrite the animations from React Motion to something that could be better accelerated. Basically, the idea is, JavaScript will calculate certain CSS values for transformations etc. using differential equations - this will make for nice physical animations. This should land sometime in January if all goes well. We also work on our own collaborative editor inside the cell/ unit that should be a lot simpler and enable us to e.g. do also things like table calculation in spreadsheets or maybe even enable simple music scores/ snippets. Btw. this is all written in ClojureScript/ Clojure. You can watch more about it in Pavel Klavík's talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoIfeb31UU

Thanks for showing. I like the rich feature set for vertices. Not so much for the edges. Unlike this lib, OrgPad edges cannot have any annotation properties it seems.

Yes, this is largely by design. It should be obvious to you - the user - what the connection describes. If not, you can create a unit in the middle with a small title or something like that. You can also include e.g. an image, text, table or such in the unit, that will be shown directly, if a title is missing. You can describe anything you like like that. Have you also noticed, Ctrl + clicking, Shift + dragging a square or Ctrl + a work as expected for multi-selections? This can help e.g. when working with colours/ arrowhead styles as semantic helpers.

If you have any questions also regarding the technology or pretty much anything, you can also let us know by sending an email to: support [at] orgpad [dot] com

OrgPad is developing quite rapidly, it is likely, some things will be improved considerably in the future.

Nice! But like many map/graph tools, it's lagging quite a bit when zooming or panning around. (Chrome on older Macbook Retina)

Nice! It looks like it uses a combination of DOM and SVG. I like how the arrows start and endpoints can be rearranged with the mouse and snap in place.

The inevitable question is why not base this on an existing library... depending on the project I'd probably reach for something like D3 or cytoscape.js to build a map like this (mostly because implementing auto layout algorithms is a lot of work to do from scratch, unless it is just for fun :-).

Was this based on / inspired by cmap tools? https://cmap.ihmc.us/

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