[gephi-dev] UI improvements: lessons learnt from NAVIGaTOR

[Sébastien Heymann]

Hello,

I tried Navigator (http://ophid.utoronto.ca/navigator/) to see what
good ideas are implemented in this real-time graph viz software.
Navigator is a pretty old project (11 years now), but is still
developed by 4 people. Their last release is Jan 2011.

So clearly many design choices differ from Gephi and their layouts are
very slow, but here is a list of features that really miss in Gephi:

** Tools **
- Pan with the left mouse button, allows to freely rotate the view in 3d
- Zoom In (Ctrl++) and Zoom Out (Ctrl+-)
- Rotate tool on a selection
- Lasso selection

** View **
- Option to show the bounding box (really useful in 3d to orientate)
- Enable 3d mode easily by the View menu
- "Look at selection" in the View menu to center the view on the selected nodes

** Labels location **
The user set the label location with a simple 3x3 grid. If we click on
the center, the label is set at the center of the nodes/edges. If we
click on the top right, all the labels are at the top right of the
nodes/edges.

** Filter **
- Export a filter legend as an image

** Search **
A search box accessible as a panel

** on Graph window **
- Direct edge selection
- in the context menu of selected elements, option to Invert selection
and grow it at different depths

Their system to select elements is very different from us, but I see
we could improve our own by a simple way:
When a node is selected using the Direct Selection tool, nothing
happens and we loose the selection when the mouse has moved. This is
bad because people (me included) don't understand the purpose of the
tool. We should keep the selection (highlight) until we click
somewhere else in the graph.
When there is a selection, the Data Lab should display only the nodes
and edges corresponding to it. An option in configuration should be
"Selected subgraph only", activated by default as long as the "Visible
graph only" option. If the option is selected but no selection exists,
all the rows are displayed.


Cheers,
Seb