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Software galaxies

omoikane
14 replies
12h24m

This looks very nice, but a 2D visualization might have been more practical. For example, the fact that the dot size represents the total number of dependents is obscured by the fact that the dot sizes are also a function of camera distance.

zbendefy
11 replies
12h20m

Reminds me of the 3D file browser user interface in Jurassic Park, which was an actual application. Looks cool but its not good to use (I mean the 3d file browser, not this software galaxies, which i found quite good).

3D interfaces rarely plan out, wonder if something like a vision pro or quest could make a 3D user interface work better than a 2D counterpart.

aphrax
8 replies
12h4m

IIRC it was an SGI application - very cool but not terribly practical!

surfingdino
2 replies
11h40m

To be fair, it was all new back then and people were playing with ideas, so a 3d file browser seemed like a cool idea. A bit like the metal roller on the Paris Metro ticket machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=9SjBfRA3YzA

dcminter
1 replies
5h56m

The discoverability on those things is definitely lacking. I think it took us five or so broken touch-screens before my wife noticed that you could use that to select menu options instead! I guess once you know it's fine though? Feels a bit dated compared to the typical touch & go card payments elsewhere in Europe now though.

surfingdino
0 replies
5h27m

I couldn't work it out for a good while, because it's the most unintuitive UI I have found on reasonably recent ticket machines. Once you know how to use it, it's ok.

ProTip: if you travel from London on a train, the buffet sells Paris Metro tickets.

Fnoord
1 replies
4h21m

Yes, it was a SGI application. Probably used in the movie Hackers.

There was also a Doom file manager where you'd use BFG to nuke a directory. I only found one for Doom 3 but this also existed with original Doom. Nowadays, BFG is only used to nuke git repos.

giobox
0 replies
44m

Doom process managers where a thing for a while too, 20 years ago. Using the BFG on a crowded room of processes usually resulted in a system crash. Hunting down a stuck program and shooting it in E1M1 was pretty neat though. Your comment reminded me of playing with this in MacOS X a long time ago.

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
p_l
0 replies
8h30m

There was a bunch of "demo" applications bundled in Irix, some more some less useful, that were used to showcase the capabilities of the systems. File System Navigator was, afaik, one of them (similarly there was bundled "dogfight", a networked flight simulator game).

HPsquared
0 replies
8h40m

In VR, there was a wave of that kind of thing (3D productivity apps, file browsers etc.) None really took off though as far as I can tell.

digging
0 replies
2h43m

It's weird, because there are (at least in the Rust "galaxy") several tiny, extremely distant constellations. I thought they were background decoration until I zoomed way in on them. Hard to image why they would be so distant if they're relevant.

KolmogorovComp
5 replies
11h31m

It seems cool but is completely unusable on mobile. It still amaze me how today people do not think about designing mobile-first website.

The gap between devs and users is far from closed yet.

Arch-TK
3 replies
11h28m

Assuming this was done in free time, for fun and posted here because it looks cool, why would you hold these expectations?

This is the kind of expectations you should have of a commercial product that you're paying for. Not of someone's random side project.

KolmogorovComp
2 replies
11h8m

As you’ve said given it's a project done in their freetime I don’t have any expectations.

At the same time when I design a project I want to share to others (in my free-time too), I always think about making it working for the majority of the users (mobile in that case).

neontomo
0 replies
10h49m

I do too, but usually not until I've first validated the idea is interesting to people. Not much sense in optimising the wrong thing.

mgnienie
0 replies
9h42m

It's for us geeks, not the majority :)

gluke77
0 replies
8h17m

How users (who are non-devs) are planning to use this piece, I wonder. Also is there any well established web-native way to navigate in 3d space, that works on mobile? Personally, quake-style keyboard only navigation on my desktop works like a charm.

smartmic
4 replies
9h13m

Impressive visualization, for sure. But a honest question: What are real use cases of such a representation? I mean, can (and will) this be used in a productive manner for solving what kind of problems?

ordu
1 replies
9h4m

The only use I can imagine is to use it to write a guide on the available software. You can pick from the image clusters and make them into chapters in your guide or something like.

ErigmolCt
0 replies
5h26m

It could be very effective in some cases

throwaway55533
0 replies
9h9m

no.

Fnoord
0 replies
4h25m

Seems like a very useful way to navigate on a large touchscreen.

pmontra
4 replies
12h55m

Navigating the galaxies is frustratingly hard.

One finger touch moves forward, but it makes very hard to touch a point and see what it is. I keep selecting something past it, especially for large dots, which I'm curious to see what they are.

Rotating the device changes the direction but it's hard to point towards a specific star.

On the good side it's very nice to look at. I wish there would be something as fast as this for navigating real galaxies, with of course better controls.

Varriount
1 replies
12h32m

Although I agree that navigation via device orientation makes some navigation aspects difficult, I also find it oddly fascinating. It's like my phone has become a window into another world.

ErigmolCt
0 replies
5h28m

I think I had the same feelings

sva_
0 replies
3h39m

It seemed hard at first, until I decided to get up and pan around (looking like a fool).

Imagine you're in a spaceship and pushing down accelerates it.

It was fascinating how quickly this perspective gave me a sense of orientation.

soraminazuki
0 replies
3h28m

It was easy with a PC and keyboard.

wiz21c
3 replies
8h59m

When you imagine that each dot is a program and that behind each of these dots, there is at least on person, it gives a very good appreciation of how complex each of these projects are. These are pretty big human architectures..

sva_
0 replies
3h59m

Would be interesting to see one for the Linux Kernel. Each include an edge on the graph

martin-adams
0 replies
8h24m

Going to be wild when AI starts to contribute to the code base on it's own

ErigmolCt
0 replies
5h29m

And it emphasizes the immense human effort involved in these projects.

FrostKiwi
2 replies
12h4m

Hell yeah. In our department we setup Gource to render out a video every midnight and pimped it out with a bunch of overlays and profile pics to show project progress and to visualize who worked on what. Shown endlessly looping on an iPad in front of the department, so no contributions are forgotten, especially the ones by interns who participated only a short while.

mdtrooper
0 replies
5h28m

Cool. Do you have public (in a git repo or something) this setup for Gource?

gavinhoward
0 replies
2h38m

+1 for providing the setup if you can. I love Gource.

yayr
2 replies
8h53m

just to be a bit astronomically nitpicky ... ;-)

they are more like star clusters than galaxies. Galaxies usually have a lot of mostly circular momentum with arms forming etc.

might be even the better marketing term "Software star clusters"

not to mention the widely accepted hypothesis that galaxies require dark matter to be held together... we don't want to dive into the analogy here for software, or do we? ;-)

bregma
0 replies
7h53m

But really it's the dark web that binds us all?

HPsquared
0 replies
8h42m

Not to be confused with Github stars and their social dynamics.

ahmadnoid
2 replies
3h21m

Am I the only one who is getting some sort of gambling site (go-search.org) when clicking on golang galaxy?

linux2647
0 replies
3h20m

That’s what I get too

theoa
1 replies
11h41m

Wonderful!

Want more.

Every blob displays its icon

Mouseover over displays much more stuff

Right-click: the world is your oyster

Ctrl-click: make a group, etc, much much more

Ultimately: create 3D bash/OS/

martypitt
0 replies
10h36m

This is a UNIX System! I know this!

tantalor
1 replies
4h6m

My God! It's full of leftpads

egorfine
0 replies
52m

is-even was the first package I have tried to search.

wing-_-nuts
0 replies
3h31m

I use his reddit graph all the time to find related subs. That one is 2d and imho is much more useful than a 3d visualization. Sad that it's probably not getting updated any longer due to reddit's apis no longer being available.

ramesh31
1 replies
4h25m

Holy crap, Bower still exists?

brandly
0 replies
3h47m

I think this is a 9 year old snapshot of Bower

pyeri
1 replies
11h35m

Off topic, I still couldn't find an easy or seamless way to search GitHub repos by keywords (repo name, coding language, etc) and have them order by most stars descending.

marapuru
1 replies
12h49m

Interesting and very cool!

But since navigating around is not easy, would it be an idea to implement a game like controller that allows you to move around?

Current controls are not working so well.

artpar
0 replies
12h19m

seems to be done in the same way, but the parameters are off. aswd (camera angle) + arrow keys(panning) works nicely when zoomed out but very sensitive when zoomed in.

kreyenborgi
1 replies
11h21m

Fun. Needs haskell hackage :-)

klibertp
1 replies
2h37m

Is it just me, my extensions, or are the controls broken in Firefox?

numbers
0 replies
1h27m

might be you, I am on firefox and things work fine. Press ? key to show the controls if you don't see them.

jzer0cool
1 replies
10h17m

How does this manage to plot so many points yet running pretty smoothly here on a low end computer browser?

sva_
0 replies
3h22m

I'd presume a WebGL particle shader

etwigg
1 replies
11h26m

super cool, but no jvm maven central?

ivolimmen
0 replies
11h23m

Yeah that is what I came to ask here as well. Also no p2...

Edit: I see someone open an issue for it https://github.com/anvaka/pm/issues/2

dim13
1 replies
10h18m

As for Go, the dataset looks very-very old and outdated. At least 5 to 10 years old.

kkoncevicius
0 replies
7h51m

Same for R

zheninghuang
0 replies
7h42m

Doing a Research paper Galaxies would also be interesting, especially in the domain of AI.

xnorswap
0 replies
3h41m

Nuget has a lovely SampleDependency constellation.

witx
0 replies
9h42m

This is such a cool visualization. It's so interesting to see that Rust's embedded libraries are on a more separate, dense, group.

viveknathani_
0 replies
5h12m

love this!

visarga
0 replies
10h46m

Where is CPAN, I don't see it.

sachahjkl
0 replies
3h23m

no nix pkgs, what's even the point

rpgwaiter
0 replies
11h21m

This is so cool! I’d love to see this kind of thing for nixpkgs

robertlagrant
0 replies
10h4m

Incredible. The amount of effort that goes into each of those dots.

quectophoton
0 replies
2h42m

Links in the Go galaxy point to a casino page.

peteforde
0 replies
11h38m

I'm a bit confused by the Rubygems visualization. Many popular gems appear to be missing, and the role of Rails in the ecosystem is something you could miss if you weren't explicitly looking for it.

Cool viz, just not 100% clear what I'm looking at.

me_bx
0 replies
9h57m

From the same author:

  * Related subreddits graph - https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=linux
  * Map of reddit - https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=18239&y=12514&z=32433.55559794627&v=2

jackcviers3
0 replies
5h27m

No maven central?

I imagine it would be pretty large, too.

gregorvand
0 replies
10h33m

This is very hard to understand

ggm
0 replies
10h2m

Brew but not ports or pkgsrc

flkenosad
0 replies
41m

Shit that's cool.

edweis
0 replies
12h37m

Beautiful work

drofmij
0 replies
5m

can we do one for the java + maven repository galaxy?

cloudwalk9
0 replies
12h49m

I imagine Gentoo would be extremely difficult to visualize because USE flags add a 4th spatial dimension...

classified
0 replies
8h42m

I'm a bit disappointed that it has Homebrew, but not MacPorts, which is superior in my opinion.

bombela
0 replies
5h42m

The UX is garbage. It tracks my phone's motion, making it incredibly jittery (I guess I don't have the rock steady hands required?). And one finger starts an automatic zoom, while two fingers unzoom.

adityaathalye
0 replies
10h21m

This is art! I wonder... What if the depth at which a package first appears depends on its release date? And what if each universe evolves in terms of package releases?

Nischalj10
0 replies
1h44m

this is crazyyyy

Kuinox
0 replies
10h12m

Lots of star in the nuget galaxy, but there is not several package I worked on :(.

BoppreH
0 replies
8h0m

The gyroscope aiming on mobile is fantastic!

I've never seen a demo with such small latency and responsive to small movements. Even more impressive by being a web page and not a native web.