Browser Support

Timeplot currently works on Firefox 2.x and 3.x, Camino 1.x, Safari 3.x, Opera 9.x, and Internet Explorer 6.x and 7.x.

Timeplot does not currently work on older versions of these, particularly Safari 2.x.

In its earlier history, Timeplot did not support Internet Explorer support, but thanks to Google's "explorer canvas" library, which emulates the "canvas" tag in IE through the use of its support for VML (which is what Google Map uses to draw routes over the maps, for example). While this makes for poorer performance when weighed against other browsers, it is a clean way to get all the browsers in.

Since Safari 2.x is going to be phased out, we have no plans to support it (even if Safari 2.x supports 'canvas', it does not support window.getComputedStyle which is required by Timeplot). Although now that we use jQuery, we might be able to back-add some level of support. We'll see.

We are also aware of some rendering problems with Opera and Safari3, namely they both fail to render the plots (we are still investigating why) while they render everything else. Opera is also returning a different value than expected when calling 'getComputedStyle' which results in all sort of misalignments of the various rendering pieces.

Zooming

One of the key design ideas about Timeplot is that geometries are pluggable. This means that it's entirely possible to create geometries that can be manipulated with direct user input, for example to provide panning and zooming abilities, or fisheye lens effects. We have already started to work on these zooming geometries but they are not ready for prime time yet and will likely appear in the next releases.

Data Formats

Timeplot currently supports a plain-text format for data, which is very easy to generate and consume but doesn't adhere to any specific standard for time series data interchange. At the same time, since the Timeplot event database is based on Timeline's, it is relatively easy to extend it to provide the ability to read data from other formats, would the need emerge. If you think Timeplot should be able to read a particular format, let us know.

Back to Timeplot.