Impressions and suggestions

[Unknow0059]

I was writing two issues into another 3D viewer plugin*, when I decided to check whether other plugins like it existed, then discovered TagsRoutes was more recent.

My overall impressions are mixed, but this is, by far, megameters better than the plugin which pushed me here.

*: for the record, first issue is 18, and here, the second issue is thankfully missing.

Pros and Cons — Suggestions
(you are here)

1. Pros and Cons

+ 01. Controlling camera feels flexible and natural
+ 02. Movement of camera is smooth and soothing
! 03. Displaying orphans as if stars on a far-away celestial sphere looks good and natural, albeit this seems incidental, not designed
- 04. Bloom hurts visibility and damages performance
- 05. Selecting far nodes is hard (because they appear very small)
- 06. Seeing labels from far nodes is hard (because they appear very small)
! 07. When Toggle Label Display is enabled, and a tag node is selected or highlighted, it causes an overwhelming amount of labels to be shown.
+ 08. Hovering edges displays only nodes relevant to that edge
- 09. Hovering on edges, unintentionally, is frequent
+ 10. Tags are also nodes
- 11. Seeing nodes is hard because smallest nodes are too small, biggest nodes are too big
- 12. BUG: the settings gear disappears sometimes
+ 13. Hovering nodes displays only connected nodes
- 14. Hovering on nodes, unintentionally, is frequent
+ 15. Having a flow-animation of edges, showing direction, is nice
- 16. Seeing flow-animation of edges is generally hard, somewhat because the transparent edges partially occludes particles
- 17. Particles in flow-animation of edges should change in size alongside edge width. I can manually change this, but shouldn't need to
- 18. Nodes are all bright and visible regardless of distance from camera
- 19. Nodes have emissive surfaces, thus they lack shadows, and are less visible amidst many other nodes
! 20. Light mode is available and {04, 19} are entirely absent there, but I shouldn't need to switch to this to undo those.
+ 21. In light mode, materials are diffuse instead of emissive, so nodes have a contour shadow, improving visibility of depthness
- 22. Ability to change colors is nice, but this doesn't support filter-based colorings like the 2D graph view
- 23. When a node is selected, foreground nodes may occlude it
- 24. In light mode, flow-animation particles are more visible, but still hard to see. They would stand out if they were slightly emissive.
- 25. In light mode, {05, 06, 11} are worse
- 26. Settings changed via the top-right gear don't persist when opening/closing tab
- 27. With "global map" disabled, invisible nodes and edges are hoverable, selectable and then visible. This is neat, but confusing, liable to {09, 14} and overall unuseful.
+ 28. With "global map" disabled, after a node is selected, his connected nodes may be hovered, and when this is done, the nodes connected to that hovered node are visible, additively with the current local graph, not exclusively. This is nice.
+ 29. Extending 28, those "2nd" depth level nodes can be right-clicked and from then on, are constantly visible. That is really cool.
- 30. What the buttons and settings do is perplexing. No documentation describes their functionality. The README is ambiguously an Overview and Changelog, and is suboptimal at both.
+ 31. A cube rotates around the selected node, and is toggleable.
- 32. The cube's orientation is locked so as to always follow the camera. So, the cube cannot be used as a static reference plane for the user to orient himself.
- 33. Selections become red, and their neighbors blue, sometimes, for some reason. This extends 30.
! 34. (Minor issue) the terms "pan" and "move" are misused. The former is a label applied to Rotating the camera/graph, the latter Translating them a XY plane.
- 35. Dismissing the controls/hotkeys cheatsheet at the bottom makes them disappear entirely, never to return.
- 36. Labels are extremely hard to read, no matter what color they, the nodes, or the background, is.
- 37. Labels are occluded by geometry.
- 38. Seeing which direction edges are headed is hard, even with the flow-animation of edges.
- 39. Inability to define which types of files are converted into nodes. Extends {07,10,22}.
- 40. Nodes for tags with a count of one are visible, cluttering the graph.
+ 41. A discussion section exists here, so I'm not forced to make various issues, nor water down one issue.

There are more pros than shown, but that wouldn't be much useful.
Of these cons, {04, 09, 12, 14, 20, 27} are the worst ones.

2. Suggestions

Pros and Cons — Suggestions
(you are here)

• 2.01. Size {04}
  • A. Even in the lowest setting, there is still bloom. Allow disabling it entirely.
• 2.02. Perpectivity {05, 06, 11}
  • A. Camera sees in Orthogonal perspective, so the smallest Node/Label is always visible no matter how far it is.
  • or
  • B. Instate a lower bound on Node/Label size that's larger than the current one.
  • or
  • C. Make Node/Label size it customizable.
• 2.03. Foveation {09, 14}
  • A. Key must be held, such as Ctrl or Alt or Shift.
  • or
  • B. Node must first be selected with LMB/RMB. Accomodating for this, opening a note becomes keybound to something else.
• 2.04. Distance {18}
  • A. Nodes/Edges could increase invisibility with distance from camera
  • or
  • B. Change color indicating depthness
• 2.05. Occlusion {23}
  • A. Relative to the selected node, imagine two hemispheres, one far and one near. All the nodes in the near hemisphere should
    not be visible. This shouldn't apply to nodes connected to the selection.
• 2.06. Color change {33}
  • A. The settings label this as "highlighting". If the intent is to highlight hovered/connected nodes, this would be more useful and visible as a transparency change, instead of a color change.
• 2.07. Labels {36, 37}
  • A. Add a outline around the label text.
  • or
  • B. Add a dark background behind the label text (or make the text white, and bg black)
  • Against 37, render the labels over everything else.
• 2.08. Directionality {38}
  • A. Make the origin of an edge thicker than its end.
• 2.09. Types {22,39}
  - A. Allow customizing them via settings. Besides me, Graph customization functionality request #38 mentions these.
• 2.10. Uniques {40}
  - A. Support Negative Filtering nodes based on count. Besides me, Custom label filters , Tags with less than 2 citations #36 mentions this, albeit my use is excluding single-count tags.
  Pros and Cons — Suggestions
  (you are here)