~stef/blog/

JQuery Timecloud v1.0

Lately I have been trying to visualize a couple of things around me. One of the results is this JQuery Timecloud plugin producing somewhat nice looking animated tagclouds.

In the screenshot below I processed the Subversion logs of the Tikiwiki project and plotted the number of changes (commits) by developers over time.

As you can see below, the timecloud widget provides a similar interface to the Google Finance timeseries. In the top you have an overall view of all time activities, here you can zoom the timeframe and pan the selection.

Underneath there is a zoomed in view of the currently viewed timespan.

The first button starts/stops the animation, where the time frame is automatically advanced to the next day, thus creating an impression of moving through time. With the second button you can step forward by one frame, dunno if this is really necessary, it might be removed later.

HINT: If you set the timeframe in the overview to cover the whole dataset, you will be able to see an all encompassing tagcloud, but won't be able to animate it.

If you're interested head over to to the project home and have fun!

Cheers,

s

[UPDATE] In the download package there is an example which let's you visualize your delicious tags in such a tagcloud, unfortunately it needs a PHP enabled webserver to run.

[UPDATE2] a live example can be found here and one  for your delicious tags

[UPDATE3] the project home moved to ohloh.net, all references updated. development and versiontracking  is still at github.

[UPDATE4] demos found a new home.