JavaFx used to represent BP Oil disaster news timeline

Outside of following the on-going Gulf Oil Spill, I have been playing around with JavaFX and different ways of displaying on-going information. I wanted a clean way to represent this information, and decided to try and create an interactive timeline of the news stories created around this event:

This is based on the BBC’s timeline index, where I have taken each story and mapped it to the relevant position on the timeline. Further to this, I grabbed each stories text and saved it into the XML file which the JavaFx script parses. When you hoover your mouse over an event, the text (or image) of the story “pops” up:

You have to close the “pop-up” to be able to view another event.

I was amazed at how many stories there were, and this isn’t all, and how crowded the screen became once I loaded all the stories into the XML file.

Anyway I thought I would share it, a slightly different take on presenting on-going information. Oh, I stopped at the 15th (in the hope it was finally some good news, and the fact you have stop somewhere).

Anyway let me know your thoughts, it is just an idea I was playing with. I plan to use it else where to represent different data over time (watch this space).

There are a couple of warnings with this, a, it is 1000 by 800 in size (so viewing it on a netbook doesn’t really work, as I have discovered), b, it might be slow to load because the server I have placed it on is quite a cheap one, c, it is only a prototype of an idea.

Tags: Data visualisation, gulf oil spill, JavaFX, timeline