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Try out this new thesaurus roamer, written in Adobe Flex using the Roamer component. And download the latest version of the Roamer/SpringGraph components (version 20061210, 208k).

I had some unexpected extra time available, so I wrote a thesaurus roamer reminiscent of the classic ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus. The data for the thesaurus comes from thesaurus.com, by way of dappit.com (using the data mapper thesaurusreferencecom2. The UI is well, um, a springgraph. I’ve added a couple of new some ideas for presenting and navigating the history of items that you’ve visited. As usual, the source code is available by right-clicking.

The Roamer component is where the new history handling takes place: back/forward controls, a way to display the history in other components, and better control over how history items appear on the screen. The SpringGraph component now gives you a way to create different views for different kinds of items.

What’s new: An auto-fit mode that automatically adjusts item separation to keep all items on-screen, more control over link appearance, a history feature in the Roamer component. Check out the improved RoamerDemo, and download the latest build (20061202).

It’s been a month since I published the first version of the SpringGraph graph visualization component for Adobe Flex, and many of you have written comments, questions, compliments (thanks!) and some very good ideas. This new build of the SpringGraph and Roamer components incorporates several improvements inspired by your feedback.

The big new “feature” is the autoFit mode, which you can see in action in the updated RoamerDemo. Open a big file and crank up the “max degrees of separation” so there are lots of items on the screen. As you double-click to browse through the graph, notice how everything stays nicely fitted onto the screen. If you adjust the ‘item separation’ slider to force things offscreen, the component will gradually re-adjust things so that everything fits again. You can turn on and off autoFit mode to see the difference in behavior.

You can now tell Roamer (the component that allows you to browse very large graphs) to automatically make visible all the items you’ve visited, sort of a bread-crumb trail. In the RoamerDemo, these are the items highlighted in blue. Also, Roamer now gives you a way to show or hide individual items. This is something you could take advantage of in your own application.

I added some notes in the docs for SpringGraph discussing a few different ways of controlling the appearance of links. It’s still not very good, but it’s a start. Let me know your ideas.

Please feel free to post comments, questions, bug reports, etc. I will try to respond as soon as I can. Have fun!