When you imagine that each dot is a program and that behind each of these dots, there is at least on person, it gives a very good appreciation of how complex each of these projects are. These are pretty big human architectures..
One finger touch moves forward, but it makes very hard to touch a point and see what it is. I keep selecting something past it, especially for large dots, which I'm curious to see what they are.
Rotating the device changes the direction but it's hard to point towards a specific star.
On the good side it's very nice to look at. I wish there would be something as fast as this for navigating real galaxies, with of course better controls.
Although I agree that navigation via device orientation makes some navigation aspects difficult, I also find it oddly fascinating. It's like my phone has become a window into another world.
This looks very nice, but a 2D visualization might have been more practical. For example, the fact that the dot size represents the total number of dependents is obscured by the fact that the dot sizes are also a function of camera distance.
Reminds me of the 3D file browser user interface in Jurassic Park, which was an actual application. Looks cool but its not good to use (I mean the 3d file browser, not this software galaxies, which i found quite good).
3D interfaces rarely plan out, wonder if something like a vision pro or quest could make a 3D user interface work better than a 2D counterpart.
To be fair, it was all new back then and people were playing with ideas, so a 3d file browser seemed like a cool idea. A bit like the metal roller on the Paris Metro ticket machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=9SjBfRA3YzA
The discoverability on those things is definitely lacking. I think it took us five or so broken touch-screens before my wife noticed that you could use that to select menu options instead! I guess once you know it's fine though? Feels a bit dated compared to the typical touch & go card payments elsewhere in Europe now though.
I couldn't work it out for a good while, because it's the most unintuitive UI I have found on reasonably recent ticket machines. Once you know how to use it, it's ok.
ProTip: if you travel from London on a train, the buffet sells Paris Metro tickets.
Yes, it was a SGI application. Probably used in the movie Hackers.
There was also a Doom file manager where you'd use BFG to nuke a directory. I only found one for Doom 3 but this also existed with original Doom. Nowadays, BFG is only used to nuke git repos.
Doom process managers where a thing for a while too, 20 years ago. Using the BFG on a crowded room of processes usually resulted in a system crash. Hunting down a stuck program and shooting it in E1M1 was pretty neat though. Your comment reminded me of playing with this in MacOS X a long time ago.
There was a bunch of "demo" applications bundled in Irix, some more some less useful, that were used to showcase the capabilities of the systems. File System Navigator was, afaik, one of them (similarly there was bundled "dogfight", a networked flight simulator game).
2D might be more practical if you were trying to make architectural decisions, but I feel the author's whimsical embrace of the starship metaphor made his/her project more interesting and fun. I've already seen a bunch of 2D code graphs.
It's weird, because there are (at least in the Rust "galaxy") several tiny, extremely distant constellations. I thought they were background decoration until I zoomed way in on them. Hard to image why they would be so distant if they're relevant.
Hell yeah. In our department we setup Gource to render out a video every midnight and pimped it out with a bunch of overlays and profile pics to show project progress and to visualize who worked on what. Shown endlessly looping on an iPad in front of the department, so no contributions are forgotten, especially the ones by interns who participated only a short while.
they are more like star clusters than galaxies. Galaxies usually have a lot of mostly circular momentum with arms forming etc.
might be even the better marketing term "Software star clusters"
not to mention the widely accepted hypothesis that galaxies require dark matter to be held together... we don't want to dive into the analogy here for software, or do we? ;-)
Seems unusable with unintuitive undiscoverable controls, standard touch screen controls like pinch-zoom and pan don't work on Firefox for Android. The about page says something about rotating your device, but that's a pretty bold assumption that the user wants to do that, or isn't currently on a subway/bus or otherwise in a fixed position like a stand, large tablet, or the user could have various disabilities.
Not joke part, it's a neat visualization, just a bit confusing on the distribution. There were a few, like Microsoft being way off in their own world that were kind of obvious. Yet much of the distribution seemed like stuff that was related, but got put way off somewhere without any clear link. I ended up finding angularJS refs way out in the border.
For Golang they used some exotic aggregator site, and it seems it went defunct years ago. I've tried clicking a few packages and was served casino ads.
Cool website, but I'm in a barbershop right now and can't wave my phone around like a madman to see the map. I'd love it if I could drag the sphere around with my finger on the screen.
Wow, I love this. A long time ago I did some dependency graphs for gentoo linux packages [1] and also for a django project [2]. I put all the packages on a circle with dependencies being drawn as lines. This is so much cooler!
I'm a bit confused by the Rubygems visualization. Many popular gems appear to be missing, and the role of Rails in the ecosystem is something you could miss if you weren't explicitly looking for it.
Cool viz, just not 100% clear what I'm looking at.
The graphics remind me very much of Netwars [1], although the controls of Netwars were a little bit better. However, this feels so good compared to some randomly generated universe, as you know that every star is something meaningful. And you can find actually helpful stuff: I just found logrus [2] a Go library for logging, which sounds cool :-D
Impressive visualization, for sure. But a honest question: What are real use cases of such a representation? I mean, can (and will) this be used in a productive manner for solving what kind of problems?
The only use I can imagine is to use it to write a guide on the available software. You can pick from the image clusters and make them into chapters in your guide or something like.
seems to be done in the same way, but the parameters are off. aswd (camera angle) + arrow keys(panning) works nicely when zoomed out but very sensitive when zoomed in.
Couldn’t make the Elm galaxy show up on my phone. Anyone know what accounts for the disconnected islands? I know Elm has a fairly closed-off core development process that could be part of it, but can’t otherwise tell…
The UX is garbage. It tracks my phone's motion, making it incredibly jittery (I guess I don't have the rock steady hands required?). And one finger starts an automatic zoom, while two fingers unzoom.
Off topic, I still couldn't find an easy or seamless way to search GitHub repos by keywords (repo name, coding language, etc) and have them order by most stars descending.
This is art! I wonder... What if the depth at which a package first appears depends on its release date? And what if each universe evolves in terms of package releases?
How is this data getting populated? I go to click into rust to see if I project I work on is there, and it isn't, even though its been on crates.io for years.
I use his reddit graph all the time to find related subs. That one is 2d and imho is much more useful than a 3d visualization. Sad that it's probably not getting updated any longer due to reddit's apis no longer being available.
As you’ve said given it's a project done in their freetime I don’t have any expectations.
At the same time when I design a project I want to share to others (in my free-time too), I always think about making it working for the majority of the users (mobile in that case).
How users (who are non-devs) are planning to use this piece, I wonder.
Also is there any well established web-native way to navigate in 3d space, that works on mobile?
Personally, quake-style keyboard only navigation on my desktop works like a charm.
