Dear Santa Clause (aka David Rutten)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 11, 2009 at 3:32pm

Hi Tuan,

too late! I no longer live in Finland.

I've looked into yEd a number of times, it's impressive, but also fiendishly expensive. So if you have a webpage or a paper somewhere that discusses how to do this, I'd love to know.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Tuan N. Tran on November 11, 2009 at 10:56pm

thanks for disclosing the location of mrs clause :)

expensive is relative. a $10 donation from each of the 2710 forum members put us at $27100. is that enough :) ? think: YES WE CAN!

lastly, i don't know of any paper or webpage that talk about the algorithm.

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on November 12, 2009 at 1:39am

expensive is relative. a $10 donation from each of the 2710 forum members put us at $27100. is that enough :) ? think: YES WE CAN!

Obamanomics 101 right there. Good luck on the road to serfdom.

Permalink Reply by Theunis du Toit on November 16, 2009 at 4:09pm

"Obamanomics 101 right there"

Haha, My thoughts exactly.

Permalink Reply by Jacek Jaskólski on November 16, 2009 at 9:02am

Hi guys,

I assume implementing this kind of functionality into GH will/would take a lot of time...

So, what about a little work around, just to play with it and analyzie the potential of this feature:

1. Take a GHX:

2. Import it to yED using a custom XSL file (which would extract only some items: component locations,inputs,outputs and wire connection data):

3. Use yED's automatic layouting tools to rearrange the components:

4. Export the graph to XML and use the data to modify the original GHX by replacing component coordinates:

The above is only a simulation.
I have almost no knowledge of XML/XSL, so I won't be investigating this further, but maybe someone in the forum would like to give it a try.

Permalink Reply by taz on November 16, 2009 at 9:08am

Jacek,

That's a very simple but powerful example. Nice work.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 16, 2009 at 3:59pm

Jacek,

I think one of the nice features of a sorting algorithm is that it would be capable of making near horizontal connections exactly horizontal. Can you achieve this with a yEd roundtrip?

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Peter Mehrtens on November 17, 2009 at 9:08am

Hi Jacek,

great conceptual work.

I'd love to have my components automatically untangled.

Peter

Permalink Reply by Suryansh Chandra on November 17, 2009 at 9:28am

nice work surely.

just wondering how this would react to the 'wireless' connectors that we often use for complex definitions, and also when we purposely arrange our components in a manner as to make visual sense.. sort of like clustering things on the canvas (not using GH cluster, but just keeping components close together) based on the geometry they create (say facade, roof, structure, etc. etc.).

Not meaning to discourage, but just implying that the algorithmic implication would be adding more and more functionality and making it smarter to understand/specify deliberate eccentricities in the layout.