Force-directed graphs (as in the WikiWeb "node view") tend to fascinate but then frustrate me.<p>They <i>seem</i> to show so much, in the relative placement/distances/angles of nodes and edges. But when you get right down to it, almost all that eye-catching detail is random noise. The same "spokes" could be in any radial order. The relative above/below/right/left positioning could be reversed with no loss of meaning. Often dragging a cluster can result in a completely different set of 'nearnesses'. And as andymangold mentions elsewhere in this thread, for WikiWeb even the set of nodes that are expanded from any origin are randomly chosen... so you can't even follow the same path twice.<p>So these graphs <i>tempt</i> with their visual connotation that they are information-dense and stable like a real map, but then turn out to be splatter-art, pretty but with most of the ink being random noise.<p>These problems might be fixable with extra layout constraints. What if shorter articles were always up and longer ones down? More-inlinked to the left and less-inlinked to the right? What if edge lengths or thicknesses were correlated to other notions of bidirectional similarity? Of course doing this, in an automated fashion that continues to look nice and meaningful in every corner of the dataset, is quite hard.<p>Something forcing a little more of a 'tree' feel, at least when moving in certain directions, could help pack more deterministic meaning and text into a small area. (Think vague intimations of Miller Columns within a rendered graph.)
The app itself looks gorgeous, but I dont understand the primary use case. I've been writing papers and researching for years now, and I've never found the little idea cloud thing -- it seems more like a way to connect suspects in cop movies than an actually helpful way of visualizing discrete data.
It's extremely pretty, though I question some of the UX desicisions. <p>Double-tapping an item makes it vanish. Due to the seemingly random selection of nodes that appear when re-searching for a parent node, that item may never be seen again...<p>Seems odd that a gesture like double-tapping, while not often used in iOS, would result in the exact opposite action of the familiar double-clicking to drill down or expand of other UIs.
It reminds me a little of the Web Stalker, an experimental web browser from 1997: <a href="http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=7" rel="nofollow">http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=7</a>
If you want something like this, but more generic than Wikipedia-only, have a look at PersonalBrain (<a href="http://www.thebrain.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thebrain.com/</a>, no iPad version?). To be honest, I could never make it work for my main intended use (academic papers & citations), but I really think it is a cool app with lots of potential.
For anyone who is interested, I've written a parallelized Wikipedia spidering tool in Go: <a href="https://github.com/taliesinb/wikispider" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/taliesinb/wikispider</a><p>It's for when you want to grab a small portion of the full Wikipedia graph without cutting yourself on the 30-odd gigabytes of XML the dumps provide.
I've tried a few Wikipedia apps... I always end up not using them since I find Wikipedia pages via Google and there is no way to redirect you from the web to an app. (Wikipedia could choose to do it on their end but they don't.)
Does anybody know (or is anyone willing to guess) whether the force-directed-layout is done by some available library or whether they rolled their own?
As nobody said it yet. I'm always very wary of phrases like "a portion of all proceeds will be donated...", and in this case it caused me to stop looking.
The reason is that we don't know how generous or not that portion is, and what the definition of Proceeds is.
Better to state that clearly as in "20% of the price".
It doesn't have to be a large percentage, but we do need to see it as fair.