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Analysis

Overview

This group of tasks covers the basics of Timelines. It describes the model (internal structure) and the user interactions (external structure) related to timelines. After this iteration we should have a prototypical timeline model with a simple user interface to demonstrate it.

Task requirements

• Define and describe the basic concepts of timelines:
  • Define what a timeline is:
    • are timelines defined for the whole book, for a page, or something else.
    • what different kinds of timelines exist (single page/multiple page, etc.).
    • how are timelines and links working together:
      • are timelines triggerred by links or vice versa?
      • what happens if a user triggers a link while a timeline is playing?
      • can several timelines be playing simultaneously?
    • define what timeline channels are and what objects they can hold.
    • define whether a timeline is a ProObject, a Resource or something else.
  • Define what a timeline entry is:
    • it should contain the object it affects, a start time, a duration and an action to be performed (or whatever is needed).
    • define what actions will be allowed (showing/hiding frames, playing media, etc.).
  • Describe the design in the (Timelines Design) section of the Timelines wiki page.
• Implement a basic timeline model considering the things defined.
  • Provide basic support for timeline manipulation - list, create, destroy, add/remove channel, add/remove entry, play, stop, etc.
• Define and provide a simple user interface to manipulate timelines.
  • This is 'proof of concept' only and can be quite simple and ugly - for example a table.

Task result

• Source code
• Wiki page

Implementation idea

Most of the things in the task requirements have been defined in the discussion about timelines, held on 2009-04-24. See the Timelines discussion log for more information on these concepts.

Related

TIMELINES

How to demo

• Create a book containing a couple of pages with timelines.
• Add some actions to the timelines and play them.
• Describe the concepts and show the wiki page.
• Provide a brief overview of the code.

Design

The overall design description of timelines can be found in the Timelines Design section of the Timelines wiki page. Here will be provided the internal details like classes, modules, etc.

For now, the base classes for timelines will be in the org.sophie2.base.model.book module, in a separate package (timelines). If needed, at a later stage, timelines, links and scripting can be separated to their own interactivity module. The base classes for the model are Timeline, Channel, TimelineEntry and EventTimelineEntry.

A new module for the UI and manipulation of timelines will be created - org.sophie2.main.func.timelines. It will hold classes for the user interface and the interactions, manipulating the timelines. At first, it will provide a very simple (and ugly) interface for demonstration purposes only ('proof of concept'). It will be changed at the next revision of the task or at some of the other tasks related to timelines.

It will contain a table with one row for each channel and one column for each second of the timeline. At first timelines will be with a fixed duration of 10 seconds. Each cell in the timeline will have a checkbox showing whether the corresponding element is visible or not. This table will be placed in a TimelinesPalette in the bottom flap. The existing timelines tab will be removed from the left flap.

Here follow a dependency and a class diagram for the timelines model:

Intial tests are provided in the attached patches.

Implementation

As a start, the bottom flap has been added to the application. This required great refactoring of the MDMainWindow class as well as some skinning and other minor fixes. The unnecessary TimelinesTab has been removed as well. [2401]

Taking the 'design by contract' approach, extensive javadoc has been written to all methods in the base module. Timeboxing requires reducing the scope so not all of them will be implemented, but still enough information for them is present. [2409]

The basic part of the model is implemented according to the design. At the current stage, the intro and outro are not used. There is a channel for each frame instead of each group of page elements (since groups need reimplementation).[2415], [2435]

The basic UI consists of a table containing a row for each channel and a column for each second of the length of the timeline. There's a checkbox in each cell that controls the frame visibility in that second. Playing, pausing, rewinding the timeline and looping is supported from the UI as well. [2458]

Testing

^{Place the testing results here.}

Comments

I've added some suggestions for how the timeline UI could work here. --danvisel, 29-04-09.