TIMELINE. Relative dates for timeline

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Timeline looks like a really useful tool so far, but you're really limiting
its potential by making it use Gregorian or ISO dates. While this works for
historical timelines or calendars, there are also applications for
timelines that require the use of relative dates, i.e. starting your
timeline at "Day 0" or "Hour 0" or even "Time 0", rather than absolute
dates. Also, it would be great to be able to limit you timeline so that it
starts (or ends) at 0, and the user cannot scroll past this date.

For example, you could make a timeline for D-day, but instead of giving
absolute dates, you would display a D -3, D -2, D -1 countdown. There are
also uses for timelines in science, especially in developmental biology
(one of my areas of interest), where it is really useful to illustrate an
experiment or phenomenon on a timeline, but it is completely meaningless to
assign absolute dates or times.

I don't have the experience to implement this myself, but it looks like it
should be easy to do. It would require a creating setting in
"Timeline.createBandInfo" called "dateType", which would default to
gregorian but could also be set to "relative". Then instead of setting the
date to be "Jun 28 2006 00:00:00 GMT", you could set "0" or "+5" or "-1".

I hope I've convinced you to implement this feature for Timeline...
Thank you,
Catia

[Submitted by Catia on simile.mit.edu] 

Timeline
Relative dates for timeline
Created: 19/Oct/07 11:57 AM   Updated: 20/Oct/07 02:56 PM   
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Issue 79 of 136 issue(s)
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Timeline looks like a really useful tool so far, but you're really limiting
its potential by making it use Gregorian or ISO dates. While this works for
historical timelines or calendars, there are also applications for
timelines that require the use of relative dates, i.e. starting your
timeline at "Day 0" or "Hour 0" or even "Time 0", rather than absolute
dates. Also, it would be great to be able to limit you timeline so that it
starts (or ends) at 0, and the user cannot scroll past this date.

For example, you could make a timeline for D-day, but instead of giving
absolute dates, you would display a D -3, D -2, D -1 countdown. There are
also uses for timelines in science, especially in developmental biology
(one of my areas of interest), where it is really useful to illustrate an
experiment or phenomenon on a timeline, but it is completely meaningless to
assign absolute dates or times.

I don't have the experience to implement this myself, but it looks like it
should be easy to do. It would require a creating setting in
"Timeline.createBandInfo" called "dateType", which would default to
gregorian but could also be set to "relative". Then instead of setting the
date to be "Jun 28 2006 00:00:00 GMT", you could set "0" or "+5" or "-1".

I hope I've convinced you to implement this feature for Timeline...
Thank you,
Catia
 Description    
   Timeline looks like a really useful tool so far, but you're really
limiting its potential by making it use Gregorian or ISO dates. While this
works for historical timelines or calendars, there are also applications
for timelines that require the use of relative dates, i.e. starting your
timeline at "Day 0" or "Hour 0" or even "Time 0", rather than absolute
dates. Also, it would be great to be able to limit you timeline so that it
starts (or ends) at 0, and the user cannot scroll past this date. For
example, you could make a timeline for D-day, but instead of giving
absolute dates, you would display a D -3, D -2, D -1 countdown. There are
also uses for timelines in science, especially in developmental biology
(one of my areas of interest), where it is really useful to illustrate an
experiment or phenomenon on a timeline, but it is completely meaningless to
assign absolute dates or times. I don't have the experience to implement
this myself, but it looks like it should be easy to do. It would require a
creating setting in "Timeline.createBandInfo" called "dateType", which
would default to gregorian but could also be set to "relative". Then
instead of setting the date to be "Jun 28 2006 00:00:00 GMT", you could set
"0" or "+5" or "-1". I hope I've convinced you to implement this feature
for Timeline... Thank you, Catia
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David F. Huynh - 20/Oct/07 02:56 PM
We actually have other units, such as "millions of years" in the dinosaurs
example

  http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/examples/dinosaurs/dinosaurs2.html

and day counts in this planning example

  http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/misc/planning.html 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by GabrielR...@googlemail.com on 8 Apr 2009 at 7:28

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi, about the planning example, I think I've found a bug.

After dragging a couple of times the weeks band to the left, suddenly the band 
gets repainted, leaving it out of 
sync. I guess it's a problem in the ether-painters.js file (the one for the 
planning extension, of course), but I still 
haven't found it out.

Original comment by muerma...@gmail.com on 16 Jul 2009 at 7:05

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Yes, the problem seems to be in the calculation of the offset value for the 
band layer. My guess is that the 
this._start value at the Timeline.LinearEther.prototype.dateToPixelOffset 
function is not being calculated 
correctly. I have been checking it but I don't know how to fix it. Any ideas 
would be appreciated.

Original comment by muerma...@gmail.com on 21 Jul 2009 at 7:56