Mad Prime

ExploreTree, a processing program I've made for displaying and browsing tree data structures, has been rewritten and features have been added. New features include:

• Two modes of drawing: "slanted" and "radial" (see pics below)
• Two methods of avoiding overlapping node names: "nudge" and "hide"
• Dotted lines indicating more of the tree lies beyond an outer node
• Dynamic tree depth: adjusts depth so that there is never more than N nodes visible

Old features still there are:

• Search for organism & path highlighting
• Click to move to a node
• Forward and backwards movement with arrow keys
• Font adjustment & tree depth adjustment
• Right-clicking on a node (or control-click for Macs) opens up the corresponding Wikipedia page

The main version of the tree, a manually created tree I've made, is on the main site www.exploretree.org. Here is an image of it as a "slanted" tree with "nudged" nodes, near "rose" (to which the path is highlighted):

The original version of the program had no ability to display branching distances, but the new version does. You can see this when the it's used to display a tree downloaded from Interactive Tree of Life website. Here is an image of this as a "radial" tree with overlapping nodes "hidden", within Metazoa (aka. "animals") and the path highlighted to Homo sapiens (aka. "human"):

In addition to the new features, part of the motivation for this update was that I can envision a lot of adaptations of this program for specific uses. The original version's code was all entangled, making it extremely difficult to modify. This re-write has attempted to modularize the code a fair amount. At the very least this will make it easier for me to create spin-off programs from it in the future. Maybe a version that can read in "GEDCOM" genealogical data to make family trees -- the age of the parent at birth can be used to determine branch lengths!

The New York Times has a nice article on flower evolution today.

If you enjoy looking at evolutionary trees to see how closely related different living things are, you might enjoy playing with ExploreTree. I've added features that make it a lot more fun: the zooming in and out is animated, you can search for an organism and follow a path. Plus now, with a little help from Chris, it runs on a webpage (feel free to show it to friends & family). Give it time to load, though.

Here is a snapshot of the location illustrated in the NYTimes article:

I've put off posting about the program for a while since I kept hoping to improve it a little more, but here it is. It was written in processing, you can get the code if you'd like to play with it here (or improve it!) on github.