I had conceived of the original Totally Subjective Biaxial Scatterplot to succinctly explain why Snakes on a Plane was disappointing. It got a generally positive reception, but enough of a negative one that I dropped it in shame. However, enough people brought it up last time I was being social that I decided to try to flesh it out and make it a real critical tool.

So here is a really basic prototype, complete with silly little buglike icon. Clicking it will launch a new window. Hopefully.

The Flash movie pulls in review data from an XML file and then plots it. Right now it's hardcoded with just Lifeforce, but passing parameters should be doable. Getting the basic functionality in Flash was not too difficult, but I had a really hard time getting control over the text. It turns out that styling XML text in Flash is a massive pain in the ass. I also wanted to have a scrolling bottom pane for more text, but it so happens that the TextArea component has strong ideas about what it wants to look like, and I know from earlier projects that editing a component style is serious business. Maybe Flash is not the way to go at all and I should be doing this in Javascript. But that would remove the option of cheesy vector overlays and slideshows. This is your cue to direct me towards amazing Javascript graphics libraries.

It's still very bare-bones - the Flash movie's just grabbing the entire contents of the XML file and plotting all of it, and I should probably have it pick out data points via an array or something. I'm not sure if I should keep at it in this direction though. The current setup has some vexing limitations. I don't want to embed the Flash movie in a Livejournal post because I think it would be overlarge and silly looking. I don't know if LJ lets you embed arbitrary Flash anyway. On top of this there is a Flash caching issue. Javascript is looking better and better. But! I wanted to have the icon trigger a pop-up window at an appropriate size, but I can't, because LJ strips out javascript. So all I can do is have it open a new window, which I can't reliably resize. I gues it could open to a scatterplots home page which then links to each one, but that's getting further away from my admittedly vague vision for how this should work. Most likely I should set up a proper blog, but then I have to worry about stuff like spambots and RSS feeds and have I mentioned recently that I am very lazy?

So this post is more or less an informal survey. What features would you like to see? I asked georgedorn this question and he spun out a dizzying fairytale vision of an app that people could submit movies to and vote on with a database backend and whoa. Maybe someday. I was just thinking more axes would be nice. In fact the need for a way to offer Points for Effort to account for Lifeforce's valiant attempt at awesomeness is why I added variable dot size. Might try color as well.

Tell me what to do, reader. It might get done one day.

Tags: dvd review, nerdery

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